'Madame Brancka,' he said, with a coldness and calmness which it cost him hard to preserve, 'this conversation is of no use that I can see. I came to tell you a hard fact—simply this, that you must leave Hohenszalras within the next few hours. As the master of this house, I insist on it.'
'But how will you accomplish it?'
'I will compel you to go,' said Sabran, between his teeth, 'if I disgrace you publicly before all my household. The fault will not be mine. I have endeavoured to spare you; but if you be so dead to all feeling and decency as to think it possible that the same roof can shelter you and my wife, I must undeceive you, however roughly.'
She heard him patiently and smiled a little. 'Disgrace me?' she echoed gently. 'Count Brancka will kill you.'
Sabran signified by a gesture that the possibility was profoundly indifferent to him. He turned to leave her.
'Understand me plainly,' he said, as he moved away. 'I leave it at your option to invent any summons, any excuse, as your reason for your departure; but if you do not announce your departure for this afternoon, I shall do what I have said. I have the honour to wish you good-morning.'
'Wait a moment,' said Madame Brancka, still very softly. 'Are you judicious to make an enemy of me?'
'I much prefer you as an enemy,' said Sabran, curtly; and he added, with contemptuous irony, 'your friendship is far more perilous than your animosity; your compliments are like the Borgia's banquets.'
'Ah!' said Olga Brancka, once again, 'you are ungrateful like all men, and you are not very wise either. You forget that I am the sister-in-law of Egon Vàsàrhely.'
Sabran could never hear that name mentioned without a certain inward tremor, a self-consciousness which he could not entirely conceal. But he was infuriated, and he answered with reckless scorn: