"I am disturbing you?" he asked, bowing and barely touching with the tips of his fingers the hand she had extended to him on entering. "Excuse me, I thought you alone. Will you be pleased to name another time for the conversation which I take the liberty of demanding?" "No, no," she replied, not permitting him to finish his sentence. "I was with Peppino Ardea, who will await me," said she, gently. "Moreover, you know I am in all things for the immediate. When one has something to say, it should be said, one, two, three?.... First, there is not much to say, and then it is better said.... There is nothing that will sooner render difficult easy explanations and embroil the best of friends than delay and maintaining silence." "I am very happy to find you in such a mind," replied Boleslas, with a sarcasm which distorted his handsome face into a smile of atrocious hatred. The good-nature displayed by her cut him to the heart, and he continued, already less self-possessed: "It is indeed an explanation which I think I have the right to ask of you, and which I have come to claim." "To claim, my dear?" said the Countess, looking him fixedly in the face without lowering her proud eyes, in which those imperative words had kindled a flame. If she had been admirable the preceding evening in facing as she had done the return of her discarded lover, on coming direct from the tete-a-tete with her new one, perhaps, at that moment, she was doubly so, when she did not have her group of intimate friends to support her. She was not sure that the madman who confronted her was not armed, and she believed him perfectly capable of killing her, while she could not defend herself. But a part had to be played sooner or later, and she played it without flinching. She had not spoken an untruth in saying to Peppino Ardea: "I know only one way: to see one's aim and to march directly to it." She wanted a definitive rupture with Boleslas. Why should she hesitate as to the means? She was silent, seeking for words. He continued: "Will you permit me to go back three months, although that is, it seems, a long space of time for a woman's memory? I do not know whether you recall our last meeting? Pardon, I meant to say the last but one, since we met last night. Do you concede that the manner in which we parted then did not presage the manner in which we met?" "I concede it," said the Countess, with a gleam of angry pride in her eyes, "although I do not very much like your style of expression. It is the second time you have addressed me as an accuser, and if you assume that attitude it will be useless to continue." "Catherine!".... That cry of the young man, whose anger was increasing, decided her whom he thus addressed to precipitate the issue of a conversation in which each reply was to be a fresh burst of rancor.