them, and whom they love. Maud was not of that order. Certainly she
loved dearly the seductive Boleslas, wedded against her parents' will the
perfidious one for whom she had sacrificed all, living far from her
native land and her family for years, because it pleased him, breathing,
living, only for him and for their boy. But there was within her--as her
long, square chin, her short nose and the strength of her brow revealed--
the force of inflexibility--which is met with in characters of an
absolute uprightness. Love, with her, could be stifled by disgust, or,
rather, she considered it degrading to continue to love one whom she
scorned, and, at that moment, it was supreme scorn which reigned in her
heart. She had, in the highest degree, the great virtue which is found
wherever there is nobility, and of which the English have made the basis
of their moral education--the religion, the fanaticism of loyalty. She
had always grieved on discovering the wavering nature of Boleslas. But
if she had observed in him, with sorrow, any exaggerations of language,
any artificial sentiment, a dangerous suppleness of mind, she had
pardoned him those defects with the magnanimity of love, attributing them
to a defective training. Gorka at a very early age had witnessed a
stirring family drama--his mother and his father lived apart, while
neither the one nor the other had the exclusive guidance of the child.
How could she find indulgence for the shameful hypocrisy of two years'
standing, for the villainy of that treachery practised at the domestic
hearth, for the continued, voluntary disloyalty of every day, every hour?
Though Maud experienced, in the midst of her despair, the sort of
calmness which proves a firm and just resolution, when she reentered the
Palazzetto Doria--what a drama had been enacted in her heart since her
going out!--and it was in a voice almost as calm as usual that she asked:
"Is the Count at home?"

What did she experience when the servant, after answering her in the