air there was nothing which spoke to the soul of the painter.

He remained indifferent, unmoved by any emotion, without ceasing for a
single moment to see reality. The cemetery was a hideous, gloomy,
repulsive place, with an odor of decay. Renovales thought he could
perceive a stench of putrefaction scattered in the wind which bent the
pointed tops of the cypresses, and swayed the old wreaths and the
branches of the rose bushes.

He looked at Cotoner with a sort of displeasure. He was to blame for his
coldness. His presence was a check on him which prevented him from
showing his feelings. Though a friend, he was a stranger, an obstacle
between him and the dead. He interfered with that silent dialogue of
love and forgiveness of which the master had dreamed as he came. He
would come back alone. Perhaps the cemetery would be different in
solitude.

And he came back; he came back the next day. The keeper greeted him with
a smile, realizing that he was a profitable visitor.

The cemetery seemed larger, more imposing in the silence of the bright,
quiet morning. He had no one to talk with; he heard no human sound but
that of his own steps. He went up stairways, crossed galleries, leaving
behind him his indifference, thinking anxiously that every step took him
farther from the living, that the gate with its greedy keeper was
already far away and that he was the only living being, the only one who
thought and could feel fear in the mournful city of thousands and
thousands of beings, wrapped in a mystery which made them imposing amid
the strange, dull sounds of the land beyond that terrifies with the
blackness of its bottomless abyss.

When he reached Josephina's grave, he took off his hat.

No one. The trees and the rose bushes trembled in the wind among the
cross paths. Some birds were twittering above him in an acacia, and the
sound of life, disturbing the rustling of the solitary vegetation, shed
a certain calm over the painter's spirit, blotted out the childish fear
he had felt before he reached there, as he crossed the echoing pavements
of the colonnades.

For a long time he remained motionless, absorbed in the contemplation of
that marble case obliquely cut by a ray of sunlight, one part golden,
the other blue in the shadow. Suddenly he shivered, as if he had
awakened at the sound of a voice,--his own. He was talking, aloud,
driven to cry out his thoughts, to stir this deathly silence with
something that meant li