“At a thought.  Without any charlatanism of passion I am able to tell you of something to match your devotion.  I was not afraid for your sake to come within a hair’s breadth of what to all the world would have been a squalid crime.  Note that you and I are persons of honour.  And there might have been a criminal trial at the end of it for me.  Perhaps the scaffold.”

“Do you say these horrors to make me tremble?”

“Oh, you needn’t tremble.  There shall be no crime.  I need not risk the scaffold, since now you are safe.  But I entered this room meditating resolutely on the ways of murder, calculating possibilities and chances without the slightest compunction.  It’s all over now.  It was all over directly I saw you here, but it had been so near that I shudder yet.”

She must have been very startled because for a time she couldn’t speak.  Then in a faint voice: 

“For me!  For me!” she faltered out twice.

“For you—­or for myself?  Yet it couldn’t have been selfish.  What would it have been to me that you remained in the world?  I never expected to see you again.  I even composed a most beautiful letter of farewell.  Such a letter as no woman had ever received.”

Instantly she shot out a hand towards me.  The edges of the fur cloak fell apart.  A wave of the faintest possible scent floated into my nostrils.

“Let me have it,” she said imperiously.

“You can’t have it.  It’s all in my head.  No woman will read it.  I suspect it was something that could never have been written.  But what a farewell!  And now I suppose we shall say good-bye without even a handshake.  But you are safe!  Only I must ask you not to come out of this room till I tell you you may.”

I was extremely anxious that Senor Ortega should never even catch a glimpse of Dona Rita, never guess how near he had been to her.  I was extremely anxious the fellow should depart for Tolosa and get shot in a ravine; or go to the Devil in his own way, as long as he lost the track of Dona Rita completely.  He then, probably, would get mad and get shut up, or else get cured, forget all about it, and devote himself to his vocation, whatever it was—­keep a shop and grow fat.  All this flashed through my mind in an instant and while I was still dazzled by those comforting images, the voice of Dona Rita pulled me up with a jerk.

“You mean not out of the house?”

“No, I mean not out of this room,” I said with some embarrassment.

“What do you mean?  Is there something in the house then?  This is most extraordinary!  Stay in this room?  And you, too, it seems?  Are you also afraid for yourself?”

“I can’t even give you an idea how afraid I was.  I am not so much now.  But you know very well, Dona Rita, that I never carry any sort of weapon in my pocket.”

“Why don’t you, then?” she asked in a flash of scorn which bewitched me so completely for an instant that I couldn’t even smile at it.