All this passed in such low tones that we seemed to make out the words more by watching each other’s lips than through our sense of hearing.  Man is a strange animal.  I didn’t care what I said.  All I wanted was to keep her in her pose, excited and still, sitting up with her hair loose, softly glowing, the dark brown fur making a wonderful contrast with the white lace on her breast.  All I was thinking of was that she was adorable and too lovely for words!  I cared for nothing but that sublimely aesthetic impression.  It summed up all life, all joy, all poetry!  It had a divine strain.  I am certain that I was not in my right mind.  I suppose I was not quite sane.  I am convinced that at that moment of the four people in the house it was Dona Rita who upon the whole was the most sane.  She observed my face and I am sure she read there something of my inward exaltation.  She knew what to do.  In the softest possible tone and hardly above her breath she commanded:  “George, come to yourself.”

Her gentleness had the effect of evening light.  I was soothed.  Her confidence in her own power touched me profoundly.  I suppose my love was too great for madness to get hold of me.  I can’t say that I passed to a complete calm, but I became slightly ashamed of myself.  I whispered: 

“No, it was not from affection, it was for the love of you that I brought him here.  That imbecile H. was going to send him to Tolosa.”

“That Jacobin!” Dona Rita was immensely surprised, as she might well have been.  Then resigned to the incomprehensible:  “Yes,” she breathed out, “what did you do with him?”

“I put him to bed in the studio.”

How lovely she was with the effort of close attention depicted in the turn of her head and in her whole face honestly trying to approve.  “And then?” she inquired.

“Then I came in here to face calmly the necessity of doing away with a human life.  I didn’t shirk it for a moment.  That’s what a short twelvemonth has brought me to.  Don’t think I am reproaching you, O blind force!  You are justified because you are.  Whatever had to happen you would not even have heard of it.”

Horror darkened her marvellous radiance.  Then her face became utterly blank with the tremendous effort to understand.  Absolute silence reigned in the house.  It seemed to me that everything had been said now that mattered in the world; and that the world itself had reached its ultimate stage, had reached its appointed end of an eternal, phantom-like silence.  Suddenly Dona Rita raised a warning finger.  I had heard nothing and shook my head; but she nodded hers and murmured excitedly,

“Yes, yes, in the fencing-room, as before.”

In the same way I answered her:  “Impossible!  The door is locked and Therese has the key.”  She asked then in the most cautious manner,

“Have you seen Therese to-night?”

“Yes,” I confessed without misgiving.  “I left her making up the fellow’s bed when I came in here.”