as need of anything," she
said.

"Madame has forbidden any one to enter her room," replied the footman,
with embarrassment, and, at the same moment, Madame Steno, who had just
opened the note, said, in a voice which struck the young girl by its
change:

"Let us go; I do not feel well, either."

The woman, so haughty, so accustomed to bend all to her will, was indeed
trembling in a very pitiful manner beneath the insult of those phrases
which drove her, Caterina Steno, away with such ignominy. She paled to
the roots of her fair hair, her face was distorted, and for the first
and last time Alba saw her form tremble. It was only for a few
moments. At the foot of the staircase energy gained the mastery in that
courageous character, created for the shock of strong emotions and
for instantaneous action. But rapid as had been that passage, it had
sufficed to disconcert the young girl. For not a moment did she doubt
that the note was the cause of that extraordinary metamorphosis in the
Countess's aspect and attitude. The fact that Maud would not receive
her, her friend, in her room was not less strange. What was happening?
What did the letter contain? What were they hiding from her? If she had,
the day before, felt the "needle in the heart" only on divining a scene
of violent explanation between her mother and Boleslas Gorka, how would
she have been agonized to ascertain the state into which the few lines
of Boleslas's wife had cast that mother! The anonymous denunciation
recurred to her, and with it all the suspicion she had in vain rejected.
The mother was unaware that for months there was taking place in her
daughter a moral drama of which that scene formed a decisive episode,
she was too shrewd not to understand that her emotion had been very
imprudent, and that she must explain it. Moreover, the rupture with Maud
was irreparable, and it was necessary that Alba should be included in
it.

The mother, at once so guilty and so loving, so blind and so
considerate, had no sooner foreseen the necessity than her decision was
made, and a false explanation invented:

"Guess what Maud has just written me?" said she, brusquely, to her
daughter, when they were seated side by side in their carriage. God,
what balm the simple phrase introduced into Alba's heart! Her mother was
about to show her the note! Her joy was short-lived! The note remained
where the Countess had slipped it, after having nervously folded it, in
the opening i