I shuddered to hear rising from the floor, by my side, a vibrating, scornful:  “Do!  Why, slink off home looking over your shoulder as you used to years ago when I had done with you—­all but the laughter.”

“Rita,” I murmured, appalled.  He must have been struck dumb for a moment.  Then, goodness only knows why, in his dismay or rage he was moved to speak in French with a most ridiculous accent.

“So you have found your tongue at last—­Catin!  You were that from the cradle.  Don’t you remember how . . .”

Dona Rita sprang to her feet at my side with a loud cry, “No, George, no,” which bewildered me completely.  The suddenness, the loudness of it made the ensuing silence on both sides of the door perfectly awful.  It seemed to me that if I didn’t resist with all my might something in me would die on the instant.  In the straight, falling folds of the night-dress she looked cold like a block of marble; while I, too, was turned into stone by the terrific clamour in the hall.

“Therese, Therese,” yelled Ortega.  “She has got a man in there.”  He ran to the foot of the stairs and screamed again, “Therese, Therese!  There is a man with her.  A man!  Come down, you miserable, starved peasant, come down and see.”

I don’t know where Therese was but I am sure that this voice reached her, terrible, as if clamouring to heaven, and with a shrill over-note which made me certain that if she was in bed the only thing she would think of doing would be to put her head under the bed-clothes.  With a final yell:  “Come down and see,” he flew back at the door of the room and started shaking it violently.

It was a double door, very tall, and there must have been a lot of things loose about its fittings, bolts, latches, and all those brass applications with broken screws, because it rattled, it clattered, it jingled; and produced also the sound as of thunder rolling in the big, empty hall.  It was deafening, distressing, and vaguely alarming as if it could bring the house down.  At the same time the futility of it had, it cannot be denied, a comic effect.  The very magnitude of the racket he raised was funny.  But he couldn’t keep up that violent exertion continuously, and when he stopped to rest we could hear him shouting to himself in vengeful tones.  He saw it all!  He had been decoyed there! (Rattle, rattle, rattle.) He had been decoyed into that town, he screamed, getting more and more excited by the noise he made himself, in order to be exposed to this! (Rattle, rattle.) By this shameless “Catin!  Catin!  Catin!”

He started at the door again with superhuman vigour.  Behind me I heard Dona Rita laughing softly, statuesque, turned all dark in the fading glow.  I called out to her quite openly, “Do keep your self-control.”  And she called back to me in a clear voice:  “Oh, my dear, will you ever consent to speak to me after all this?  But don’t ask for the impossible.  He was born to be laughed at.”