u. You are not worthy of him."

"Listen, Maud," said Boleslas, sadly, after a pause, "remember that it
is perhaps the last time we shall meet.... To-morrow, if I am killed,
you shall do as you like.... If I live, I promise to consent to any
arrangement that will be just.... What I ask of you is--and I have the
right, notwithstanding my faults--in the name of our early years of
wedded life, in the name of that son himself, to leave me in a different
way, to have a feeling, I don't say of pardon, but of pity."

"Did you have it for me," she replied, "when you were following your
passion by way of my heart? No!".... And she walked before him in order
to reach the door, fixing upon him eyes so haughty that he involuntarily
lowered his. "You have no longer a wife and I have no longer a
husband.... I am no Madame Maitland; I do not avenge myself by means of
anonymous letters nor by denunciation.... But to pardon you?... Never,
do you hear, never!"

With those words she left the room, with those words into which she put
all the indomitable energy of her character.... Boleslas did not essay
to detain her. When, an hour after that horrible conversation, his valet
came to inform him that dinner was served, the wretched man was still
in the same place, his elbow on the mantelpiece and his forehead in
his hand. He knew Maud too well to hope that she would change her
determination, and there was in him, in spite of his faults, his folly
and his complications, too much of the real gentleman to employ means
of violence and to detain her forcibly, when he had erred so gravely. So
she went thus. If, just before, he had exaggerated the expression of his
feelings in saying, in thinking rather, that he had never ceased loving
her, it was true that amid all his errors he had maintained for her an
affection composed particularly of gratitude, remorse, esteem and, it
must be said, of selfishness.

He loved for the devotion of which he was absolutely sure, and then,
like many husbands who deceive an irreproachable wife, he was proud of
her, while unfaithful to her. She seemed to him at once the dignity and
the charity of his life. She had remained in his eyes the one to whom he
could always return, the assured friend of moments of trial, the haven
after the tempest, the moral peace when he was weary of the troubles of
passion. What life would he lead when she was gone? For she would go!
Her resolution was irrevocable. All dropped from his s