thought of the Ortega problem mainly in the terms of Dona Rita’s safety.  Her image presided at every council, at every conflict of my mind, and dominated every faculty of my senses.  It floated before my eyes, it touched my elbow, it guarded my right side and my left side; my ears seemed to catch the sound of her footsteps behind me, she enveloped me with passing whiffs of warmth and perfume, with filmy touches of the hair on my face.  She penetrated me, my head was full of her . . .  And his head, too, I thought suddenly with a side glance at my companion.  He walked quietly with hunched-up shoulders carrying his little hand-bag and he looked the most commonplace figure imaginable.

Yes.  There was between us a most horrible fellowship; the association of his crazy torture with the sublime suffering of my passion.  We hadn’t been a quarter of an hour together when that woman had surged up fatally between us; between this miserable wretch and myself.  We were haunted by the same image.  But I was sane!  I was sane!  Not because I was certain that the fellow must not be allowed to go to Tolosa, but because I was perfectly alive to the difficulty of stopping him from going there, since the decision was absolutely in the hands of Baron H.

If I were to go early in the morning and tell that fat, bilious man:  “Look here, your Ortega’s mad,” he would certainly think at once that I was, get very frightened, and . . . one couldn’t tell what course he would take.  He would eliminate me somehow out of the affair.  And yet I could not let the fellow proceed to where Dona Rita was, because, obviously, he had been molesting her, had filled her with uneasiness and even alarm, was an unhappy element and a disturbing influence in her life—­incredible as the thing appeared!  I couldn’t let him go on to make himself a worry and a nuisance, drive her out from a town in which she wished to be (for whatever reason) and perhaps start some explosive scandal.  And that girl Rose seemed to fear something graver even than a scandal.  But if I were to explain the matter fully to H. he would simply rejoice in his heart.  Nothing would please him more than to have Dona Rita driven out of Tolosa.  What a relief from his anxieties (and his wife’s, too); and if I were to go further, if I even went so far as to hint at the fears which Rose had not been able to conceal from me, why then—­I went on thinking coldly with a stoical rejection of the most elementary faith in mankind’s rectitude—­why then, that accommodating husband would simply let the ominous messenger have his chance.  He would see there only his natural anxieties being laid to rest for ever.  Horrible?  Yes.  But I could not take the risk.  In a twelvemonth I had travelled a long way in my mistrust of mankind.

We paced on steadily.  I thought:  “How on earth am I going to stop you?” Had this arisen only a month before, when I had the means at hand and Dominic to confide in, I would have simply kidnapped the fellow.  A little trip to sea would not have done Senor Ortega any harm; though no doubt it would have been abhorrent to his feelings.  But now I had not the means.  I couldn’t even tell where my poor Dominic was hiding his diminished head.