ause it is impossible. Be satisfied to be my best friend.
You know I show a confidence in you that I do not show to Monteverde.
Yes, I tell you things I would never tell him."

"But the other part!" exclaimed the painter violently. "What I need,
what I am hungry for,--you, your beauty, real love!"

"Master, contain yourself," she said with affected modesty. "How well I
know you! You're going to say some of those horrid things that men
always say when they rave over a woman. I'm going away so as not to hear
you."

Then she added with maternal seriousness, as if she wanted to reprimand
his violence:

"I am not so crazy as people think. I consider the consequences of my
actions carefully. Mariano, look at yourself, think of your position. A
wife, a daughter who will marry one of these days, the prospect of being
a grandfather. And you still think of such follies! I could not accede
to your proposal even if I loved you. How terrible! To deceive
Josephina, the friend of my school-days! Poor thing, so gentle, so
kind,--always ill. No, Mariano, never. A man cannot enter such
compromising affairs, unless he is free. I could never feel like loving
you. Friends, nothing more than friends!"

"Well, we will not be that," exclaimed Renovales impetuously. "I will
leave your house forever. I will not see you any longer. I will do
anything to forget you. It is an intolerable torment. My life will be
calmer if I do not see you."

"You will not go away," said Concha quietly, certain of her power. "You
will remain beside me just as you always have, if you really like me,
and I shall have in you my best friend. Don't be a baby, master, you
will see that there is something charming about our friendship that you
do not understand now. I shall give you something that the rest do not
know,--intimacy, confidence."

And as she said this, she put one hand on the painter's arm and drew
closer to him, searching him with her eyes in which there was a strange,
mysterious light.

A horn sounded near them; there was swift rush of heavy wheels. An
automobile shot past them at full speed, following the highroad.
Renovales tried to make out the figures in the car, hardly larger than
dolls in the distance. Perhaps it was Lopez de Sosa, who was driving,
perhaps his wife and daughter were those two little figures, wrapped in
veils, who occupied the seats.

The possibility of Josephina's having passed through the background of
the landscape withou