s so hermetically sealed that I am no farther
advanced than I was on the first day. I have seen her glance at her
mother as she did this morning, with loving, admiring eyes. I have seen
her turn pale at a word, a gesture, on her part. I have seen her
embrace Maud Gorka, and play tennis with that same friend so gayly, so
innocently. I have seen that she could not bear the presence of Maitland
in a room, and yet she asked the American to take her portrait....
Is she guileless?... Is she a hypocrite? Or is she tormented by
doubt-divining, not divining-believing, not believing in-her mother? Is
she underhand in any case, with her eyes the color of the sea? Has she
the ambiguous mind at once of a Russian and an Italian?... This would be
a solution of the problem, that she was a girl of extraordinary inward
energy, who, both aware of her mother's intrigues and detesting them
with an equal hatred, had planned to precipitate the two men upon each
other. For a young girl the undertaking is great. I will go to the
Countess's to-morrow night, and I will amuse myself by watching Alba, to
see... If she is innocent, my deed will be inoffensive. If perchance she
is not?"

It is vain to profess to one's own heart a complaisant dandyism of
misanthropy. Such reflections leave behind them a tinge of a remorse,
above all when they are, as these, absolutely whimsical and founded on a
simple paradox of dilettantism. Dorsenne experienced a feeling of shame
when he awoke the following morning, and, thinking of the mystery of
the letters received by Gorka, he recalled the criminal romance he had
constructed around the charming and tender form of his little friend;
happily for his nerves, which were strained by the consideration of the
formidable problem. If it is not some one in the Countess's circle, who
has written those letters? He received, on rising, a voluminous package
of proofs with the inscription: "Urgent." He was preparing to give
to the public a collection of his first articles, under the title of
'Poussiere d'Idees.'

Dorsenne was a faithful literary worker. Usually, involved titles
serve to hide in a book-stall shop--made goods, and romance writers or
dramatic authors who pride themselves on living to write, and who seek
inspiration elsewhere than in regularity of habits and the work-table,
have their efforts marked from the first by sterility. Obscure or
famous, rich or poor, an artist must be an artisan and practise these
frui