whelming nightmare. Poor Josephina! His
thought filled him with horror, he felt the infernal desire burning his
conscience, like a hot iron that throws off a shower of sparks when
touched. It was not tenderness that made him turn again towards his
companion; not that; his old animosity remained. But he thought of her
years of sacrifice, of the privations she had suffered, following him in
the struggle with misery, without a complaint, without a protest, in the
pains of motherhood, in the nursing of her daughter, that Milita who
seemed to have stolen all the strength of her body and perhaps was the
cause of her decline. How terrible to wish for her death! He hoped that
she would live. He would bear everything with the patience of duty. She
die? Never, he would rather die himself.

But in vain did he struggle to forget the thought. The atrocious,
monstrous desire, once awakened, resisted, refused to recede, to hide,
to die in the windings of his brain whence it had arisen. In vain did he
repent his villainy, or feel ashamed of his cruel idea, striving to
crush it forever. It seemed as though a second personality had arisen
within him, rebellious to his commands, opposed to his conscience, hard
and indifferent to his sympathetic scruples, and this personality, this
power, continued to sing in his ear with a merry accent, as if it
promised him all the pleasures of life.

"If she would only die! Eh, master? If she would only die!"

PART II

I

At the coming of spring Lopez de Sosa, "the intrepid sportsman," as
Cotoner called him, appeared at Renovales' house every afternoon.

Outside the entrance gate stood his eighty-horsepower automobile, his
latest acquisition, of which he was intensely proud, a huge green car,
that started and backed under the hand of the chauffeur while its owner
was crossing the garden of the painter's house.

Renovales saw him enter the studio, in a blue suit with a shining visor
over his eyes, affecting the resolute bearing of a sailor or an
explorer.

"Good afternoon, Don Mariano, I have come for the ladies."

And Milita came down stairs in a long gray coat, with a white cap,
around which she wound a long blue veil. After her came her mother clad
in the same fashion, small and insignificant beside the girl, who seemed
to overwhelm her with her health and grace.

Renovales approved of these trips. Josephina's legs were troubling her;
a sudden weakness sometimes kept her in h