He sat back in his chair, content for the moment with the progress he had made. He glanced at the countess. He was too experienced a man to be tricked. The countess was really asleep. Her cap was on one side, her mouth open. A woman who is pretending to sleep usually does so in becoming attitudes. De Chauxville did not speak again for some minutes. He sat back in his chair, leaning his forehead on his hand, while he peeped through his slim fingers. He could almost read the girl's thoughts as she put them into music. "She does not hate him yet," he was reflecting. "But she needs only to see him with Etta a few times and she will come to it." The girl played on, throwing all the pain in her passionate, untamed heart into the music. She knew nothing of the world; for half of its temptations, its wiles, its wickednesses were closed to her by the plain face that God had given her. For beautiful women see the worst side of human nature--they usually deal with the worst of men. Catrina was an easy tool in the hands of such as Claude de Chauxville; for he had dealt with women and that which is evil in women all his life, and the only mistakes he ever made were those characteristic errors of omission attaching to a persistent ignorance of the innate good in human nature. It is this same innate good that upsets the calculations of most villains. Absorbed as she was in her great grief, Catrina was in no mood to seek for motives--to split a moral straw. She only knew that this man seemed to understand her as no one had ever understood her. She was content with the knowledge that he took the trouble to express and to show a sympathy of which those around her had not suspected her to be in need. The moment had been propitious, and Claude de Chauxville, with true Gallic insight, had seized it. Her heart was sore and lonely--almost breaking--and she was without the worldly wisdom which tells us that such hearts must, at all costs, be hidden from the world. She was without religious teaching--quite without that higher moral teaching which is independent of creed and conformity, which is only learnt at a good mother's knee. Catrina had not had a good mother. She had had the countess--a weak-minded, self-indulgent, French-novel-reading woman. Heaven protect our children from such mothers! In the solitude of her life Catrina Lanovitch had conceived a great love--a passion such as a few only are capable of attaining, be it for weal or woe. She had seen this love ignored--walked under foot by its object with a grave deliberation which took her breath away when she thought of it. It was all in all to her; to him it was nothing. Her philosophy was simple. She could not sit still and endure. At this time it seemed unbearable. She must turn and rend some one. She did not know whom. But some one must suffer. It was in this that Claude de Chauxville proposed to assist her.