master. Warned by a
mysterious intuition, she started to run toward it. There! Perhaps
there! The painter's steps sounded behind her. He had started from his
dejection when he saw her fleeing; he followed her in a frenzy of fear.
Concha foresaw that she was going to know the truth; a cruel truth with
all the crudeness of a discovery in broad daylight. She stopped,
scowling with a mental effort before that portrait which seemed to
dominate the studio, occupying the best easel, in the most advantageous
position, in spite of the solitary gray of its canvas.

The master saw in Concha's face the same expression of doubt and
surprise which he had seen in Cotoner's. Who was that? But the
hesitation was shorter; her woman's pride sharpened her senses. She saw
beyond that unrecognizable head the circle of older portraits which
seemed to guard it.

Ah! The immense surprise in her eyes; the cold astonishment in the
glance she fixed on the painter as she surveyed him from head to foot!

"Is it Josephina?"

He bowed his head in mute assent. But his silence seemed to him
cowardly; he felt that he must cry out in the presence of those
canvases, what he had not dared to say outside. It was a longing to
flatter the dead woman, to implore her forgiveness, by confessing his
hopeless love.

"Yes, it is Josephina."

And he said it with spirit, going forward a step, looking at Concha as
if she were an enemy, with a sort of hostility in his eyes which did not
escape her notice.

They did not say anything more. The countess could not speak. Her
surprise passed the limits of the probable, the known.

In love with his wife,--and after she was dead! Shut up like a hermit in
order to paint her with a beauty which she had never had. Life brings
surprises, but this surely had never been seen before.

She felt as if she were falling, falling, driven by astonishment and, at
the end of the fall, she found that she was changed, without a complaint
or pang of grief. Everything about her seemed strange--the room, the
man, the pictures. This whole affair went beyond her power of
conception. Had she found a woman there, it would have made her weep and
shriek with grief, roll on the floor, love the master still more with
the stimulus of jealousy. But to find that her rival was a dead woman!
And more than that--his wife! It seemed supremely ridiculous, she felt a
mad desire to laugh. But she did not laugh. She recalled the unusual
expression she