However, there had been that noise—­the why and the how of it?  Of course in the dark he might have fallen into the bath, but that wouldn’t have been a faint noise.  It wouldn’t have been a rattle.  There was absolutely nothing he could knock over.  He might have dropped a candle-stick if Therese had left him her own.  That was possible, but then those thick mats—­and then, anyway, why should he drop it? and, hang it all, why shouldn’t he have gone straight on and tried the door?  I had suddenly a sickening vision of the fellow crouching at the key-hole, listening, listening, listening, for some movement or sigh of the sleeper he was ready to tear away from the world, alive or dead.  I had a conviction that he was still listening.  Why?  Goodness knows!  He may have been only gloating over the assurance that the night was long and that he had all these hours to himself.

I was pretty certain that he could have heard nothing of our whispers, the room was too big for that and the door too solid.  I hadn’t the same confidence in the efficiency of the lock.  Still I . . .  Guarding my lips with my hand I urged Dona Rita to go back to the sofa.  She wouldn’t answer me and when I got hold of her arm I discovered that she wouldn’t move.  She had taken root in that thick-pile Aubusson carpet; and she was so rigidly still all over that the brilliant stones in the shaft of the arrow of gold, with the six candles at the head of the sofa blazing full on them, emitted no sparkle.

I was extremely anxious that she shouldn’t betray herself.  I reasoned, save the mark, as a psychologist.  I had no doubt that the man knew of her being there; but he only knew it by hearsay.  And that was bad enough.  I could not help feeling that if he obtained some evidence for his senses by any sort of noise, voice, or movement, his madness would gain strength enough to burst the lock.  I was rather ridiculously worried about the locks.  A horrid mistrust of the whole house possessed me.  I saw it in the light of a deadly trap.  I had no weapon, I couldn’t say whether he had one or not.  I wasn’t afraid of a struggle as far as I, myself, was concerned, but I was afraid of it for Dona Rita.  To be rolling at her feet, locked in a literally tooth-and-nail struggle with Ortega would have been odious.  I wanted to spare her feelings, just as I would have been anxious to save from any contact with mud the feet of that goatherd of the mountains with a symbolic face.  I looked at her face.  For immobility it might have been a carving.  I wished I knew how to deal with that embodied mystery, to influence it, to manage it.  Oh, how I longed for the gift of authority!  In addition, since I had become completely sane, all my scruples against laying hold of her had returned.  I felt shy and embarrassed.  My eyes were fixed on the bronze handle of the fencing-room door as if it were something alive.  I braced myself up against the moment