[Illustration:  “Well, what do you want?  What are you doing here?”]

Suddenly changing her manner, she smiled with deliberate, mocking humor.  While he watched, she moved leisurely to a deep, many-cushioned couch; and, arranging the pillows, reclined among them in the careless abandonment of voluptuous ease and physical content.  Openly, ostentatiously, she exhibited herself to his burning gaze in various graceful poses—­lifting her arms above her head to adjust a cushion more to her liking; turning and stretching her beautiful body; moving her limbs with sinuous enjoyment—­as disregardful of his presence as though she were alone.  At last she spoke in cool, even, colorless tones; “Perhaps you will tell me what you want?”

The wretched victim of his own unbridled sensuality shook with inarticulate rage.  Choking and coughing he writhed in his chair—­his emaciated limbs twisted grotesquely; his sallow face bathed in perspiration his claw-like hands opening and closing; his bloodless lips curled back from his yellow teeth, in a horrid grin of impotent fury.  And all the while she lay watching him with that pitiless, mocking, smile.  It was as though the malevolent devil and the tortured soul had suddenly changed places.

When the man could speak, he reviled her, in his rasping whisper, with curses that it seemed must blister his tongue.  She received his effort with jeering laughter and taunting words; moving her body, now and then, among the cushions, with an air of purely physical enjoyment that, to the other, was maddening.

“If this is all you came for,”—­she said, easily,—­“might have spared yourself the effort—­don’t you think?”

Controlling himself, in a measure, he returned, “I came to tell you that your intimacy with that damned painter must stop.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly.  One hand, hidden in the cushions, clenched until her rings hurt.  “Just what do you mean by my intimacy?” she asked evenly.

“You know what I mean,” he replied coarsely.  “I mean what intimacy with a man always means to a woman like you.”

“The only meaning that a creature of your foul mind can understand,” she retorted smoothly.  “If it were worth while to tell you the truth, I would say that my conduct when alone with Mr. King has been as proper as—­as when I am alone with you.”

The taunt maddened him.  Interrupted by spells of coughing—­choking, gasping, fighting for breath, his eyes blazing with hatred and lust, mingling his words with oaths and curses—­he raged at her.  “And do you think—­that, because I am so nearly dead,—­I do not resent what—­I saw, to-day?  Do you think—­I am so far gone that I cannot—­understand—­your interest in this man,—­after—­watching you, together, all—­the afternoon?  Has there been any one—­in his studio, except you two, when—­he was painting you in that dress—­which you—­designed for his benefit?  Oh, no, indeed,—­you and your—­genius could not be interrupted,—­for