passion. This incarnation of one woman in another
was no longer a result of exasperated desire, but a deliberate habit of
vice, and now finally an imperious necessity. From thenceforth, the
unconscious instrument of his vicious imagination had become as
necessary to him as the vice itself. By a process of sensual depravity,
he had almost come to think that the real possession of Elena would not
afford him such exquisite and violent delight as the imaginary. He was
hardly able to separate the two women in his thoughts. And just as he
felt that his pleasure would be diminished by the actual possession of
the one, so his nerves received a shock if by some lassitude of the
imagination he found himself in the presence of the other without the
interposing image of her rival.

Thus he felt crushed to the earth at the thought that Don Manuel's ruin
meant for him the loss of Maria.

When she came to him that evening, he saw at once that the poor thing
was ignorant as yet of her misfortune. But the next day, she arrived,
panting, convulsed, pale as death. She threw herself into his arms, and
hid her face on his breast.

'You know?' she gasped between her sobs.

The news had spread. Disgrace and ruin were inevitable, irremediable.
There followed days of hideous torture, during which Maria, left alone
after the precipitate flight of the gamester, abandoned by the few
friends she possessed, persecuted by the innumerable creditors of her
husband, bewildered by the legal formalities of the seizure of their
effects, by bailiffs, money-lenders and rogues of all sorts, gave
evidences of a courage that was nothing less than heroic, but failed to
avert the utter ruin that overwhelmed the family.

From her lover she would receive no assistance of any kind; she told him
nothing of the martyrdom she was enduring even when he reproached her
for the brevity of her visits. She never complained; for him she always
managed to call up a less mournful smile; still obeyed the dictates of
her lover's capricious passion, and lavished upon her ruthless destroyer
all the treasures of her fond heart.

Her presentiments had not deceived her. Everything was falling in ruins
around her. Punishment had overtaken her without a moment's warning.

But she never regretted having yielded to her lover; never repented
having given herself so utterly to him, never bewailed her lost purity.
Her one sorrow--stronger than remorse, or fear, or any other trouble o