ssion. He
advised him to take her away from Madrid, a change of air,--a change of
life.

Renovales objected. Where could she go, now that winter was beginning,
when at the height of summer she had wanted to come home? The doctor
shrugged his shoulders and wrote out a prescription, revealing in his
expression the desire to write something, not to go away without leaving
a piece of paper as a trace. He explained various symptoms to the
husband in order that he might observe them in the patient and he went
away shrugging his shoulders again with a gesture that revealed
indecision and dejection.

Pshaw! Who knows? Perhaps! The system sometimes has unexpected
reactions, wonderful reserve power to resist disease.

This enigmatic consolation alarmed Renovales. He spied on his wife,
studying her cough, watching her closely when she did not see him. They
no longer spent the night together. Since Milita's marriage, the father
occupied her room. They had broken the slavery of the common bed that
tormented their rest. Renovales made up for this departure by going into
Josephina's chamber every morning.

"Did you have a good night? Do you want something?"

His wife's eyes greeted him with hostility.

"Nothing."

And she accompanied this brief statement by turning over in the bed,
disdainfully, with her back to the master.

The painter received these evidences of hostility with quiet
resignation. It was his duty; perhaps she might die! But this
possibility of death did not stir him; it left him cold and he was angry
at himself, as if two distinct personalities existed within him. He
reproached himself for his cruelty, his icy indifference before the
invalid who now produced in him only a passing remorse.

One afternoon at the Alberca woman's house, after one of their daring
meetings with which they defied the holy calm of the noble, who had now
returned from his trip, the painter spoke timidly of his wife.

"I shall have to come less; don't be surprised. Josephina is very ill."

"Very?" asked Concha.

And in the flash of her glance, Renovales thought he saw something
familiar, a blue gleam that had danced before him in the darkness of the
night with infernal glow, troubling his conscience.

"No, maybe it isn't anything. I don't believe there is any danger."

He felt forced to lie. It consoled him to discount her illness. He felt
that, by this voluntary deceit, he was relieving himself of the anxiety
that goaded him.