econd
shudder seized her as she was arranging the trifling objects, so keen,
so chilly, so that time that she paused. She lay there motionless, her
eyes fixed upon the water, whose undulations lapped the boat. At the
last moment she felt reenter her heart, not love of life, but love for
her mother. All the details of the events which would follow her suicide
were presented to her mind.

She saw herself plunging into the deep water which would close over
her head. Her suffering would be ended, but Madame Steno? She saw the
coachman growing uneasy over her absence, ringing at the door of Villa
Torlonia, the servants in search. The loosened boat would relate enough.
Would the Countess know that she had killed herself? Would she know
the cause of that desperate end? The terrible face of Lydia Maitland
appeared to the young girl. She comprehended that the woman hated her
enemy too much not to enlighten her with regard to the circumstances
which had preceded that suicide. The cry so simple and of a significance
so terrible: "You did it purposely!" returned to Alba's memory. She saw
her mother learning that her daughter had seen all. She had loved her so
much, that mother, she loved her so dearly still!

Then, as a third violent chill shook her from head to foot, Alba began
to think of another mode, and one as sure, of death without any one in
the world being able to suspect that it was voluntary. She recalled
the fact that she was in one of the most dreaded corners of the Roman
Campagna; that she had known persons carried off in a few days by the
pernicious fevers contracted in similar places, at that hour and in
that season, notably one of her friends, one of the Bonapartes living
in Rome, who came thither to hunt when overheated. If she were to try to
catch that same disease?... And she took up the oars. When she felt
her brow moist with the second effort, she opened her bodice and her
chemise, she exposed her neck, her breast, her throat, and she lay down
in the boat, allowing the damp air to envelop, to caress, to chill her,
inviting the entrance into her blood of the fatal germs. How long did
she remain thus, half-unconscious, in the atmosphere more and more laden
with miasma in proportion as the sun sank? A cry made her rise and again
take up the oars. It was the coachman, who, not seeing her return, had
descended from the box and was hailing the boat at all hazards. When she
stepped upon the bank and when he saw her s