It was the lie of the man who justifies himself by
pretending not to know the depth of the harm he has caused.

"It isn't anything," he said to his daughter, who, greatly alarmed at
her mother's appearance, came to spend every night with her. "Just a
cold. It will disappear as soon as good weather comes."

He had a fire in every fireplace in the house; the rooms were as hot as
a furnace. He declared loudly, without any show of excitement, that his
wife was merely suffering from a slight cold, and as he spoke with such
assurance, a strange voice seemed to cry within him: "You lie, she is
dying; she is dying and you know it."

The symptoms of which the doctor had spoken began to appear with ominous
regularity in fatal succession. At first he noticed only a constant high
fever that seemed to grow worse with severe chills at the end of the
afternoon. Then he observed sweats that were terrifying in their
frequency--sweats at night that left the print of her body on the
sheets. And that poor body, which grew more fragile, more like a
skeleton, as if the fire of the fever were devouring the last particle
of fat and muscle, was left without any other covering and protection
than the skin, and that too seemed to be melting away. She coughed
frequently; at all hours of the day and night her painful hacking
disturbed the silence of the house. She complained of a continual pain
in the lower part of her chest. Her daughter made her eat by dint of
coaxing, lifting the spoon to her mouth, as if she were a child. But
coughing and nausea made nutrition impossible. Her tongue was dry; she
complained of an infernal thirst that was devouring her.

Thus passed a month. Renovales, in his optimistic mood, strove to
believe that her illness would not last long.

"She is not dying, Pepe," he would say in a convinced tone, as if he
were disposed to quarrel with anyone who opposed this statement. "She is
not dying, doctor. You don't think she is, do you?"

The doctor would answer with his everlasting shrug. "Perhaps,--it's
possible." And as the patient refused to submit to an internal
examination, he was forced to inquire of the daughter and husband about
the symptoms.

In spite of her extreme emaciation, some parts of her body seemed to be
undergoing an abnormal swelling. Renovales questioned the doctor
frankly. What did he think of these symptoms? And the doctor bowed his
head. He did not know. They must wait: Nature has surprises. But