"Say that you love me! Say it at once! I need it!"
But in vain did she show her authority; in vain she brought her eyes close to him, as if she wished to look within him. The artist smiled faintly, murmured evasive words, refused to comply with her demands.
"Say it out loud, so that I can hear it. Say that you love me. Call me Phryne, as you used to when you worshiped me on your knees, kissing my body!"
He said nothing. He hung his head in shame at the memory, so as not to see her.
The countess stood up nervously. In her anger, she drew back to the middle of the studio, her hands clenched, her lips quivering, her eyes flashing. She wanted to destroy something, to fall on the floor in a convulsion. She hesitated whether to break an Arabic amphora close by, or to fall on that bowed head and scratch it with her nails. Wretch! She had loved him so dearly; she still cared for him so, feeling bound to him by both vanity and habit!
"Say whether you love me," she cried. "Say it once and for all! Yes or no?"
Still she obtained no answer. The silence was trying. Once more she believed there was another love, a woman who had come to occupy her place. But who was it? Where could he have found her? Her woman's instinct made her turn her head and glance into the next studio and beyond into the last, the real workshop of the 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?"