“Do you expect a fellow to forget your tricks, you wicked little devil?  Haven’t you ever seen me dodging about to get a sight of you amongst those pretty gentlemen, on horseback, like a princess, with pure cheeks like a carved saint?  I wonder I didn’t throw stones at you, I wonder I didn’t run after you shouting the tale—­ curse my timidity!  But I daresay they knew as much as I did.  More.  All the new tricks—­if that were possible.”

While he was making this uproar, Dona Rita put her fingers in her ears and then suddenly changed her mind and clapped her hands over my ears.  Instinctively I disengaged my head but she persisted.  We had a short tussle without moving from the spot, and suddenly I had my head free, and there was complete silence.  He had screamed himself out of breath, but Dona Rita muttering; “Too late, too late,” got her hands away from my grip and slipping altogether out of her fur coat seized some garment lying on a chair near by (I think it was her skirt), with the intention of dressing herself, I imagine, and rushing out of the house.  Determined to prevent this, but indeed without thinking very much what I was doing, I got hold of her arm.  That struggle was silent, too; but I used the least force possible and she managed to give me an unexpected push.  Stepping back to save myself from falling I overturned the little table, bearing the six-branched candlestick.  It hit the floor, rebounded with a dull ring on the carpet, and by the time it came to a rest every single candle was out.  He on the other side of the door naturally heard the noise and greeted it with a triumphant screech:  “Aha!  I’ve managed to wake you up,” the very savagery of which had a laughable effect.  I felt the weight of Dona Rita grow on my arm and thought it best to let her sink on the floor, wishing to be free in my movements and really afraid that now he had actually heard a noise he would infallibly burst the door.  But he didn’t even thump it.  He seemed to have exhausted himself in that scream.  There was no other light in the room but the darkened glow of the embers and I could hardly make out amongst the shadows of furniture Dona Rita sunk on her knees in a penitential and despairing attitude.  Before this collapse I, who had been wrestling desperately with her a moment before, felt that I dare not touch her.  This emotion, too, I could not understand; this abandonment of herself, this conscience-stricken humility.  A humbly imploring request to open the door came from the other side.  Ortega kept on repeating:  “Open the door, open the door,” in such an amazing variety of intonations, imperative, whining, persuasive, insinuating, and even unexpectedly jocose, that I really stood there smiling to myself, yet with a gloomy and uneasy heart.  Then he remarked, parenthetically as it were, “Oh, you know how to torment a man, you brown-skinned, lean, grinning, dishevelled imp, you.  And mark,” he expounded further, in a curiously doctoral tone—­“you are in all your limbs hateful:  your eyes are hateful and your mouth is hateful, and your hair is hateful, and your body is cold and vicious like a snake—­and altogether you are perdition.”