Never, since the day on which Cardinal Manning had united their destinies
in the chapel of Ardrahan Castle, had they been engaged in a crisis so
tragical. Such moments lay bare the very depths of the character.
Courageous and noble, Maud did not think of weighing her words. She did
not try to feed her jealousy, nor to accentuate the cruelty of the cause
of the insult which she had the right to launch at the man toward whom
that very morning she had been so confiding, so tender. The baseness and
the cruelty were to remain forever unknown to the woman who no longer
hesitated as to the bold resolution she had made. No. That which she
expected of the man whom she had loved so dearly, of whom she had
entertained so exalted an opinion, whom she had just seen fall so low,
was a cry of truth, an avowal in which she would find the throb of a last
remnant of honor. If he were silent it was not because he was preparing
a denial. The tenor of Maud's letter left no doubt as to the nature of
the proofs she had in her hand, which she had there no doubt. How?
He did not ask himself that question, governed as he was by a phenomenon
in which was revealed to the full the singular complexity of his nature.
The Slav's especial characteristic is a prodigious, instantaneous
nervousness. It seems that those beings with the uncertain hearts have a
faculty of amplifying in themselves, to the point of absorbing the heart
altogether, states of partial, passing, and yet sincere emotion.
The intensity of their momentary excitement thus makes of them sincere
comedians, who speak to you as if they felt certain sentiments of an
exclusive order, to feel contradictory ones the day after, with the same
ardor, with the same untruthfulness, unjustly say the victims of those
natures, so much the more deceitful as they are more vibrating.

He suffered, indeed, on discovering that Maud had been initiated into his
criminal intrigue, but he suffered more for her than for himself. It was
sufficient for that suffering to occupy a few moments, a few hours. It