they had said it was neurasthenia, now
it was diabetes, that was increasing the invalid's weakness. The master
lamented the passive resistance she opposed to all their curative
methods. She would follow them for a few days and then give them up with
calm obstinacy. Her health was better than they thought: doctors could
not cure her trouble.

At night, when they entered the bed-chamber, a deathly silence fell on
them; a leaden wall seemed to rise between their bodies. Here they no
longer had to dissemble; they looked at each other face to face with
silent hostility. Their life at night was sheer torment, but neither of
them dared to change their mode of living. Their bodies could not leave
the common bed; they found in it the places they had occupied for years.
The habit of their wills subjected them to this room and its
furnishings, with all its memories of the happy days of their youth.

Renovales would fall into the deep sleep of a healthy man, tired out
with work. His last thoughts were of the countess. He saw her in that
vague mist that shrouds the portal of unconsciousness; he went to sleep,
thinking of what he would say to her the next day. And his dreams were
in keeping with his desires, for he saw her standing on a pedestal, in
all the majesty of her nakedness, surpassing the marble of the most
famous statues with the life of her flesh. When he awakened suddenly and
stretched out his arms, he touched the body of his companion, small,
stiff, burning with the fire of fever or icy with deathly cold. He
divined that she was not asleep. She spent the nights without closing
her eyes, but she did not move, as if all her strength was concentrated
on something that she watched in the darkness with a hypnotic stare. She
was like a corpse. There was the obstacle, the leaden weight, the
phantom that checked the other woman when sometimes in a moment of
hesitation, she leaned toward him, on the point of falling. And the
terrible longing, the hideous thought came forth again in all its
ugliness, announcing that it was not dead, that it had only hidden in
the den of his brain, to rise more cruelly, more insolently.

"Why not?" argued the rejected spirit, scattering in his fancy the
golden dust of dreams.

Love, fame, joy, a new artistic life, the rejuvenation of Doctor
Faustus; he might expect everything, if kindly death would but come to
help him, breaking the chain that bound him to sadness and sickness.

But straightwa