der friend is severe
and critical. She tries to assuage, while envying them, the excessive
enthusiasms of the younger. She receives, she provokes her confidence
with the touching gravity of a counsellor. The younger friend is curious
and admiring. She shows herself in all the truth of that graceful
awakening of thoughts and emotions which precede her own period before
marriage. And when there is, as was the case with Alba Steno, a
certain discord of soul between that younger friend and her mother,
the affection for the sister chosen becomes so deep that it can not be
broken without wounds on both sides. It was for that reason that, on
leaving Rome, faithful and noble Maud experienced at once a sense of
relief and of pain--of relief, because she was no longer exposed to the
danger of an explanation with Alba; of pain, because it was so bitter
a thought for her that she could never justify her heart to her friend,
could never aid her in emerging from the difficulties of her life,
could, finally, never love her openly as she had loved her secretly.
She said to herself as she saw the city disappear in the night with its
curves and its lights:

"If she thinks badly of me, may she divine nothing! Who will now prevent
her from yielding herself up to her sentiment for that dangerous and
perfidious Dorsenne? Who will console her when she is sad? Who will
defend her against her mother? I was perhaps wrong in writing to the
woman, as I did, the letter, which might have been delivered to her in
her daughter's presence.... Ah, poor little soul!... May God watch over
her!"

She turned, then, toward her son, whose hair she stroked, as if to
exorcise, by the evidence of present duty, the nostalgia which possessed
her at the thought of an affection sacrificed forever. Hers was a nature
too active, too habituated to the British virtue of self-control to
submit to the languor of vain emotions.

The two persons of whom her friendship, now impotent, had thought, were,
for various reasons, the two fatal instruments of the fate of the "poor
little soul," and the vague remorse which Maud herself felt with regard
to the terrible note sent to Madame Steno in the presence of the young
girl, was only too true. When the servant had given that letter to
the Countess, saying that Madame Gorka excused herself on account of
indisposition, Alba Steno's first impulse had been to enter her friend's
room.

"I will go to embrace her and to see if she h