"Go away," she replied, "leave me. I do not want you. I am grateful to
you for not having deceived me."

"But your presence is too cruel. I am ashamed of having spoken to you,
now that I know you do not love me. I have been mad, do not punish me by
remaining longer. After the conversation we have just had, my honor will
not permit us to talk longer."

"You are right," said Julien, after another pause. He took his hat,
which he had placed upon a table at the beginning of that visit, so
rapidly and abruptly terminated by a confession of sentiments so strange.
He said:

"Then, farewell." She inclined her fair head without replying.

The door was closed. Alba Steno was again alone. Half an hour later,
when the footman entered to ask for orders relative to the carriage sent
back by the Countess, he found her standing motionless at the window from
which she had watched Dorsenne depart. There she had once more been
seized by the temptation of suicide. She had again felt with an
irresistible force the magnetic attraction of death. Life appeared to
her once more as something too vile, too useless, too insupportable to be
borne. The carriage was at her disposal. By way of the Portese gate and
along the Tiber, with the Countess's horses, it would take an hour and a
half to reach the Lake di Porto. She had, too, this pretext, to avoid
the curiosity of the servants: one of the Roman noblewomen of her
acquaintance, Princess Torlonia, owned an isolated villa on the border of
that lake.... She ascended hastily to don her hat. And without writing
a word of farewell to any one, without even casting a glance at the