ways asking
me for something whenever they get a chance. Heavens! Give me the
patience to stand this woman, the calm resignation to keep a cool head
and not to forget that I am a man!"

He scorned her mentally in order to maintain his indifference in this
way. Bah! A woman! and a sick one! Every man carries his cross and his
was Josephina.

But she, as if she penetrated his thoughts, stopped crying and spoke to
him slowly in a voice that shook with cruel irony.

"You need not expect anything from the Alberca woman," she said suddenly
with feminine incoherence. "I warn you that she has worshipers by the
dozen, young and stylish, too, something that counts more with women
than talent."

"What difference does that make to me?" Renovales' voice roared in the
darkness with an outbreak of wrath.

"I'm telling you, so that you won't fool yourself. Master, you are going
to suffer a failure. You are very old, my good man, the years are going
by. So old and so ugly that if you had looked the way you do when I met
you, I should never have been your wife in spite of all your glory."

After this thrust, satisfied and calm, she seemed to go to sleep.

The master remained motionless, lying on his back with his head resting
on his arms and his eyes wide open, seeing in the darkness a host of red
spots that spread out in ceaseless rotation, forming floating, fiery
rings. His wrath had set his nerves on edge; the final thrust made sleep
impossible. He felt restless, wide-awake after this cruel shock to his
pride. He thought that in his bed, close to him, he had his worst enemy.
He hated that frail form that he could touch with the slightest
movement, as if it contained the rancor of all the adversaries he had
met in life.

Old! Contemptible! Inferior to those young bloods that swarmed around
the Alberca woman; he, a man known all over Europe, and in whose
presence all the young ladies that painted fans and water-colors of
birds and flowers, grew pale with emotion, looking at him with
worshiping eyes!

"I will soon show you, you poor woman," he thought, while a cruel laugh
shook silently in the darkness. "You'll soon see whether glory means
anything and people find me as old as you believe."

With boyish joy, he recalled the twilight scene, the kiss on the
countess's hand, her gentle abandon, that mingling of resistance and
pleasure which opened the way for him to go farther. He enjoyed these
memories with a relish of vengean