"I will go to embrace her and to see if she has need of anything," she
said.

"Madame has forbidden any one to enter her room," replied the footman,
with embarrassment, and, at the same moment, Madame Steno, who had just
opened the note, said, in a voice which struck the young girl by its
change:

"Let us go; I do not feel well, either."

The woman, so haughty, so accustomed to bend all to her will, was indeed
trembling in a very pitiful manner beneath the insult of those phrases
which drove her, Caterina Steno, away with such ignominy. She paled to
the roots of her fair hair, her face was distorted, and for the first and
last time Alba saw her form tremble. It was only for a few moments.
At the foot of the staircase energy gained the mastery in that courageous
character, created for the shock of strong emotions and for instantaneous
action. But rapid as had been that passage, it had sufficed to
disconcert the young girl. For not a moment did she doubt that the note
was the cause of that extraordinary metamorphosis in the Countess's
aspect and attitude. The fact that Maud would not receive her, her
friend, in her room was not less strange. What was happening? What did
the letter contain? What were they hiding from her? If she had, the day
before, felt the "needle in the heart" only on divining a scene of
violent explanation between her mother and Boleslas Gorka, how would she
have been agonized to ascertain the state into which the few lines of
Boleslas's wife had cast that mother! The anonymous denunciation
recurred to her, and with it all the suspicion she had in vain rejected.
The mother was unaware that for months there was taking place in her