'You dared to send for her then?'
She laughed aloud, and with insolence.
'Dare? Is that a word to be used by a Russian moujik, as you are, to me, the daughter of Fedor Demetrivitch Serriatine? Certainly, I sent for your wife, my cousin. Who should know what I know, if not she? Egon might make you what promises he would; he is a man and a fool. I make none. If you prevent my seeing Wanda, I shall write to her; if you stop her letters, I shall telegraph to her; if you stop the telegrams, I will put your story in the Paris journals, where the Marquis de Sabran is as well known as the Arc de l'Étoile. You were born a serf, you shall feel the knout. It would have been well for you if you had smarted under it in your youth.'
So absorbed was he in the memory of his wife, and in the thought of the misery about to fall upon her innocent life, that the insults to himself struck on him harmless, as hail on iron.
'Spare your threats,' he said coldly. 'No one shall tell her but myself. You know her present condition; it will most likely kill her.'
'Oh, no,' said the Countess Brancka, with a little smile. 'Her nerves are of iron. She will divorce you, that is all.'
'She will be in her right,' he said, with the same coldness. Then, without another word, he turned and left her chamber.
'For a bastard, he crows well!' she said, loud enough to be heard by him, in the old twelfth-century French of the words she quoted.
Sabran went onward with a quick step; if he had paused, if he had looked back, he felt that he would have murdered her.
'Talk of the cruelty of men! What beast that lives,' he thought, 'has the slow unsparing brutality of a jealous woman?'