idnight when Cotoner went away he walked
in silence through the brilliantly lighted rooms; he prowled around the
chamber--entered it to see Josephina in bed, sweating, shaken from time
to time by a fit of coughing or in a deathlike lethargy, so thin and
small that the bed-clothes hardly showed the childlike outline of her
body. Then the master passed the rest of the night in an armchair,
smoking, his eyes staring but his brain drowsy with sleep.

His thoughts were far away. There was no use in feeling ashamed of his
cruelty; he seemed bewitched by a mysterious power that was superior to
his remorse. He forgot the sick woman; he wondered what Concha was doing
at that time; he saw her in fancy; he remembered her words, her
caresses; he thought of their nights of abandon. And when, with a
violent effort, he threw off these dreams, in expiation he would go to
the door of the sick chamber and listen to her labored breathing,
putting on a gloomy face, but unable to weep or feel the sadness he
longed to feel.

After two months of illness, Josephina could no longer stay in bed. Her
daughter would lift her out of it without any effort as if she were a
feather, and she would sit in a chair,--small, insignificant,
unrecognizable, her face so emaciated that its only features seemed to
be the deep hollows of her eyes and her nose, sharp as the edge of a
knife.

Cotoner could hardly keep back the tears when he saw her.

"There isn't anything left of her!" he would say as he went away. "No
one would know her!"

Her harrowing cough scattered a deathly poison about her. White foam
came to her lips where it seemed to harden in the corners. Her eyes grew
larger, they took on a strange glow as if they saw through persons and
things. Oh, those eyes! What a shudder of terror they awakened in
Renovales!

One afternoon they fell on him, with the intense, searching glance that
had always terrified him. They were eyes that pierced his forehead, that
laid bare his thoughts.

They were alone; Milita had gone home; Cotoner was sleeping in a chair
in the studio. The sick woman seemed more animated, eager to talk,
looking on her husband with a sort of pity as he sat beside her, almost
at her feet.

She was going to die; she was certain of death. And a last revolt of
life that recoils from the end, the horror of the unknown, made the
tears rise to her eyes.

Renovales protested violently, trying to conceal his deceit by his
shouts. Die? S