love; where they had talked so many times in low tones of his
longing for glory and wealth; where his daughter was born!

With the energy which showed in all his whims, the master put on his
clothes, and quietly, as if he feared to be overheard by his servant
who slept nearby, made his way to the chamber.

He turned the key with the caution of a thief, and advanced on tiptoe,
under the soft, pink light which an old lantern shed from the center of
the ceiling. He carefully stretched out the mattresses on the abandoned
bed. There were no sheets nor pillows. The room so long deserted was
cold. What a pleasant night he was going to spend! How well he would
sleep there! The gold-embroidered cushions from a sofa would serve as a
pillow. He wrapped himself in an overcoat and got into bed, dressed,
putting out the light so as not to see reality, to dream, peopling the
darkness with the sweet deceits of his fancy.

On those mattresses, Josephina had slept. He did not see her as in the
last days,--sick, emaciated, worn with physical suffering. His mind
repelled that painful image, bent on beautiful illusions. The Josephina
whom he saw, the Josephina within him, was the other, of the first days
of their love, and not as she had been in reality but as he had seen
her, as he had painted her.

His memory passed over a great stretch of time, dark and stormy; it
leaped from the regret of the present to the happy days of youth. He no
longer recalled the years of trying confinement, when they quarreled
together, unable to follow the same path. They were unimportant
disturbances in life. He thought only of her smiling kindness, her
generosity, and submissiveness. How tenderly they had lived together for
a part of their life, in that bed which now knew only the loneliness of
his body.

The artist shivered under his inadequate covering. In this abnormal
situation, exterior impressions called up memories--fragments of the
past that slowly came to his mind. The cold made him think of the rainy
nights in Venice, when it poured for hour after hour on the narrow
alleys and deserted canals in the deep, solemn silence of a city without
horses, without wheels, without any sound of life, except the lapping of
the solitary water on the marble stairways. They were in the same calm,
under the warm eider-down, amid the same furniture which he now half saw
in the shadow.

Through the slits of the lowered blind shone the glow of the lamp which
lig