me with which you were
impregnated and which followed you everywhere. I did not need to find
any more letters. The odor around you, that perfume of infidelity, of
sin, which always accompanied you, was enough. You, poor man, came home
thinking that everything was left outside the door, and that odor
follows you, denounces you; I think I can still perceive it."

And her nostrils dilated, as she breathed with a pained expression,
closing her eyes as though she wished to escape the images which that
perfume called up in her. Her husband persisted in his denials, now that
he was convinced that she had no other proof of his infidelity. A lie!
An hallucination!

"No, Mariano," murmured the sick woman. "She is within you; she fills
your head; from here I can see her. Once a thousand mad fancies occupied
her place,--illusions of your taste, naked women, a wantonness that was
your religion. Now it is she who fills it. It is your desire incarnated.
Go on and be happy. I am going away--there is no place for me in the
world."

She was silent for a moment and the tears came to her eyes again at the
memory of the first years of their life together.

"No one has cared for you as I have, Mariano," she said with tender
regret. "I look on you now as a stranger, without affection and without
hate. And still, there was never a woman who loved her husband so
passionately."

"I worship you. Josephina, I love you just as I did when we first met
each other. Do you remember?"

But in spite of the emotion he pretended to show, his voice had a false
ring.

"Don't try to bluff, Mariano; it is useless; everything is over. You do
not care for me nor have I either any of the old feeling."

In her face there was an expression of wonder, of surprise; she seemed
terror-stricken at her own calmness that made her forgive thus
indifferently the man who had caused her so much suffering. In her
fancy, she saw a wide garden, flowers that seemed immortal and they were
withering and falling with the advent of winter. Then her thoughts went
beyond, over the chill of death. The snow was melting; the sun was
shining once more; the new spring was coming with its court of love and
the dry branches were growing green once more with another life.

"Who knows!" murmured the sick woman with her eyes closed. "Perhaps,
after I am dead, you will remember me. Perhaps you will care for me
then, and be grateful to one who loved you so. We want a thing when it
is l