ometimes with intense reproach. Where had his
eyes been? He had lived amid all this without seeing it. Every day he
had passed by Josephina without noticing her. His wife was resurrected;
henceforth, she would sit down at table, she would enter his chamber, he
would pass through the house always under the gaze of two eyes which in
the past had pierced into his soul.

The dead woman was not dead; she hovered about him, revived by his hand.
He could not take a step without seeing her face on every side. She
greeted him from above the doors, from the ends of the rooms she seemed
to call him.

In his three studios, his surprise was still greater. All his most
intimate painting, which he had done as study, from impulse, without any
desire for sale, was stored away there, and all was a memory of the dead
woman. The pictures which dazzled the callers were hung low, down on the
level of the eyes, on easels, or fastened to the wall, amid the
sumptuous furniture; up above, reaching to the ceiling were arranged the
studies, memories, unframed canvases, like old, forgotten works, and in
this collection at the first glance Renovales saw the enigmatic face
rising towards him.

He had lived without lifting his eyes, accustomed as he was to
everything about him, and looking around, without seeing, without
noticing those women, different in appearance but alike in expression,
who watched him from above. And the countess had been there several
afternoons, to see him alone in the studio! And the Persian silk
draperies, hung on lances before the deep divan, had not hidden them
from that sad, fixed gaze which seemed to multiply in the upper stretch
of the walls.

To forget his remorse, he amused himself by counting the canvases which
reproduced his wife's dainty little face. They were many--the whole life
of an artist. He tried to remember when and where he had painted them.
In the first days of his love, he felt that he must paint her, with an
irresistible impulse to transfer to the canvas everything he delighted
to see, everything he loved. Afterwards, it had been a desire to flatter
her, to coax her with a false show of affection, to convince her that
she was the only object of his artistic worship, copying her in a vague
likeness, giving to her features, marred by illness, a soft veil of
idealism. He could not live without working and, like many painters, he
used as models the people around him. His daughter had carried to her
new