It was with this resolution, made in truth with the fullest strength of her heart, that she arrived at Cannes on the afternoon of the same day, accompanied by Madame Brion, who did not wish to leave her; and, as soon as she arrived, she had, almost under the dictation of her faithful friend, written and despatched the letter which overwhelmed Hautefeuille. She truly believed herself to be sincere in her resolution to separate from him, and yet if she had been able to read to the bottom of her heart, she might have seen, from a very trifling act, how fragile this resolution was, and how much she was possessed by thoughts of love. No sooner had she written to him from whom she wished to separate forever than, at the same place, and with the same ink, she wrote two letters to two persons of her acquaintance, in whose love-affairs she was the confidante, and to some extent the accomplice,--Miss Florence Marsh and the Marquise Andryana Bonnacorsi. She invited them to lunch with her on the morrow, thus obeying a profound instinct which impels a woman who loves and suffers to seek the company of women who are also in love, with whom she may talk of sentimental things, of the happiness which warms them, who will pity her sorrow, if she tells them of it, who will understand her and whom she will understand. Usually, as she had said the night before, the hesitation of the sentimental and timid Italian woman fatigued her, and in the passion of the American girl for the Archduke's assistant, there was an element of deliberate positivism, which jarred upon her native impulsiveness. But the young widow and the young girl were two women in love, and that sufficed, in this season of melancholy, to make it delightful, almost necessary, to see them. She little thought that this impulsive and natural invitation would provoke a violent scene with her husband, or that a conjugal conflict would arise from it, whose final episode was to have a tragic influence upon the issue of that growing passion, which her reason had sworn to renounce. Having arrived at Cannes at three o'clock in the afternoon, she had not seen him during the rest of the day. She knew that he had been with Marcel Verdier in the laboratory, nor was she surprised to see him appear at the dinner hour, accompanied by his aide-de-camp, Comte von Laubach, the professional spy of His Highness, without a sign of interest in her health, without a question as to how she had spent the past ten days.