visit which Boleslas had made to Piove and from which he only returned
the following day, giving as a pretext a missed train; words uttered
aside on the balcony of the Palais Steno at night, while she talked with
Alba. Yes, it was at Venice that their adultery began, before her who
had divined nothing, her whose heart was filled with inconsolable regret
for her lost darling! Ah, how could he? she moaned again, and the
visions multiplied.

In her mind were then opened all the windows which Gorka's perfidity and
the Countess's as well, had sealed with such care. She saw again the
months which followed their return to Rome, and that mode of life so
convenient for both. How often had she walked out with Alba, thus
freeing the mother and the husband from the only surveillance annoying to
them. What did the lovers do during those hours? How many times on
returning to the Palazzetto Doria had she found Catherine Steno in the
library, seated on the divan beside Boleslas, and she had not mistrusted
that the woman had come, during her absence, to embrace that man, to talk
to him of love, to give herself to him, without doubt, with the charm of
villainy and of danger! She remembered the episode of their meeting at
Bayreuth the previous summer, when she went to England alone with her
son, and when her husband undertook to conduct Alba and the Countess from
Rome to Bavaria. They had all met at Nuremberg. The apartments of the
hotel in which the meeting took place became again very vivid in Maud's
memory, with Madame Steno's bedroom adjoining that of Boleslas's.

The vision of their caresses, enjoyed in the liberty of the night, while
innocent Alba slept near by, and when she rolled away in a carriage with
little Luc, drew from her this cry once more: "Ah, how could he!"....
And immediately that vision awoke in her the remembrance of her husband's
recent return. She saw him traversing Europe on the receipt of an