What did the lovers do during those hours?
How many times on returning to the Palazzetto Doria had she found Catherine Steno in the library, seated on the divan beside Boleslas, and she had not mistrusted that the woman had come, during her absence, to embrace that man, to talk to him of love, to give herself to him, without doubt, with the charm of villainy and of danger! She remembered the episode of their meeting at Bayreuth the previous summer, when she went to England alone with her son, and when her husband undertook to conduct Alba and the Countess from Rome to Bavaria.

They had all met at Nuremberg.

The apartments of the hotel in which the meeting took place became again very vivid in Maud's memory, with Madame Steno's bedroom adjoining that of Boleslas's.
The vision of their caresses, enjoyed in the liberty of the night, while innocent Alba slept near by, and when she rolled away in a carriage with little Luc, drew from her this cry once more: "Ah, how could he!"....
And immediately that vision awoke in her the remembrance of her husband's recent return.

She saw him traversing Europe on the receipt of an anonymous letter, to reach that woman's side twenty-four hours sooner.

What a proof of passion was the frenzy which had not allowed him any longer to bear doubt and absence!...