see her return from that conversation."

It was indeed Boleslas whom the Countess found in the salon, which she
had chosen as the room the most convenient for the stormy explanation
she anticipated. It was isolated at the end of the hall, and was like
a pendant to the terrace. It formed, with the dining-room, the entire
ground-floor, or, rather, the entresol of the house. Madame Steno's
apartments, as well as the other small salon in which Peppino was, were
on the first floor, together with the rooms set apart for the Contessina
and her German governess, Fraulein Weber, for the time being on a
journey.

The Countess had not been mistaken. At the first glance exchanged on the
preceding day with Gorka, she had divined that he knew all. She would
have suspected it, nevertheless, since Hafner had told her the few words
indiscreetly uttered by Dorsenne on the clandestine return of the Pole to
Rome. She had not at that time been mistaken in Boleslas's intentions,
and she had no sooner looked in his face than she felt herself to be in
peril. When a man has been the lover of a woman as that man had been
hers, with the vibrating communion of a voluptuousness unbroken for two
years, that woman maintains a sort of physiological, quasi-animal
instinct. A gesture, the accent of a word, a sigh, a blush, a pallor,
are signs for her that her intuition interprets with infallible
certainty. How and why is that instinct accompanied by absolute oblivion
of former caresses? It is a particular case of that insoluble and
melancholy problem of the birth and death of love. Madame Steno had no
taste for reflection of that order. Like all vigorous and simple
creatures, she acknowledged and accepted it. As on the previous day,
she became aware that the presence of her former lover no longer touched
in her being the chord which had rendered her so weak to him during