while she was plunged in despair, there was in Rome and in her immediate
vicinity a creature bent upon realizing a mad vow. And that creature was
the same who had not recoiled before the infamy of an anonymous letter,
pretty and sinister Lydia Maitland--that delicate, that silent young
woman with the large brown eyes, always smiling, always impenetrable in
the midst of that dull complexion which no emotion, it seemed, had ever
tinged. The failure of her first attempt had exasperated her hatred
against her husband and against the Countess to the verge of fury, but a
concentrated fury, which was waiting for another occasion to strike, for
weeks, patiently, obscurely. She had thought to wreak her vengeance by
the return of Gorka, and in what had it ended? In freeing Lincoln from a
dangerous rival and in imperilling the life of the only being for whom
she cared!

The sojourn at the country-seat of her husband's mistress exasperated
Lydia's hidden anger. She suffered so that she cried aloud, like an
imprisoned animal beating against the bars, when she pictured to herself
the happiness which the two lovers would enjoy in the intimacy of the
villa, with the beauties of the Venetian scenery surrounding them. No
doubt the wife could provoke a scandal and obtain a divorce, thanks to
proofs as indisputable as those with which she had overwhelmed Maud. It
would be sufficient to carry to a lawyer the correspondence in the
Spanish escritoire. But of what use? She would not be avenged on her
husband, to whom a divorce would be a matter of indifference now that he
earned as much money as he required, and she would lose her brother. In
vain Lydia told herself that, warned as Alba had been by her letter, her
doubt of Madame Steno's misconduct would no longer be impossible. She
was convinced by innumerable trifling signs that the Contessina still
doubted, and then she concluded: