There are conversations and, above all, adieux which a man who is about to fight a duel always likes to avoid.

Although he forced a smile, he no longer doubted.

His wife's evident agitation could not be explained by any other cause.
Could he divine that she had learned not only of the duel, but, too, of an intrigue that day ended and of which she had known nothing for two years?
As she was silent, and as that silence embarrassed him, he tried, in order to keep him in countenance, to take her hand and kiss it, as was his custom.

She repelled him with a look which he had never seen upon her face and said to him, handing him the sheet of paper lying before her: "Do you wish to read this note before I send it to Madame Steno, who is in the salon with her daughter ?" Boleslas took the letter.

He read the terrible lines, and he became livid.