immediate deduction possessed the poor child--Florent was fighting for
his brother-in-law. And on account of whom, if not of Madame Steno? The
thought would not, however, have possessed her a second in the face of
the very plausible explanation made by the Countess, if Alba had not had
in her heart a certain proof that her mother was not telling the truth.
The young girl loved Maud as much as she was loved by her. She knew the
sensibility of her faithful and, delicate friend, as that friend knew
hers. For Maud to write her mother a letter which produced an immediate
rupture, there must have been some grave reason.

Another material proof was soon joined to that moral proof. Granted the
character and the habits of the Countess, since she had not shown Maud's
letter to her daughter there and then, it was because the letter was not
fit to be shown. But she heard on the following day only the description
of the duel, related by Maitland to Madame Steno, the savage aggression
of Gorka against Dorsenne, the composure of the latter and the issue,
relatively harmless, of the two duels.

"You see," said her mother to her, "I was right in saying that Gorka is
mad!.... It seems he has had a fit of insanity since the duel, and that
they prevent him from seeing any one.... Can you now comprehend how Maud
could blame me for what is hereditary in the Gorka family?"

Such was indeed the story which the Venetian and her friends, Hafner,
Ardea, and others, circulated throughout Rome in order to diminish the
scandal. The accusation of madness is very common to women who have
goaded to excess man's passion, and who then wish to avoid all blame for
the deeds or words of that man. In this case, Boleslas's fury and his
two incomprehensible duels, fifteen minutes apart, justified the story.
When it became known in the city that the Palazzetto Doria was strictly