“Yes,” I cried.  “But don’t let yourself go.”

I don’t know whether Ortega heard us.  He was exerting then his utmost strength of lung against the infamous plot to expose him to the derision of the fiendish associates of that obscene woman! . . . Then he began another interlude upon the door, so sustained and strong that I had the thought that this was growing absurdly impossible, that either the plaster would begin to fall off the ceiling or he would drop dead next moment, out there.

He stopped, uttered a few curses at the door, and seemed calmer from sheer exhaustion.

“This story will be all over the world,” we heard him begin.  “Deceived, decoyed, inveighed, in order to be made a laughing-stock before the most debased of all mankind, that woman and her associates.”  This was really a meditation.  And then he screamed:  “I will kill you all.”  Once more he started worrying the door but it was a startlingly feeble effort which he abandoned almost at once.  He must have been at the end of his strength.  Dona Rita from the middle of the room asked me recklessly loud:  “Tell me!  Wasn’t he born to be laughed at?” I didn’t answer her.  I was so near the door that I thought I ought to hear him panting there.  He was terrifying, but he was not serious.  He was at the end of his strength, of his breath, of every kind of endurance, but I did not know it.  He was done up, finished; but perhaps he did not know it himself.  How still he was!  Just as I began to wonder at it, I heard him distinctly give a slap to his forehead.  “I see it all!” he cried.  “That miserable, canting peasant-woman upstairs has arranged it all.  No doubt she consulted her priests.  I must regain my self-respect.  Let her die first.”  I heard him make a dash for the foot of the stairs.  I was appalled; yet to think of Therese being hoisted with her own petard was like a turn of affairs in a farce.  A very ferocious farce.  Instinctively I unlocked the door.  Dona Rita’s contralto laugh rang out loud, bitter, and contemptuous; and I heard Ortega’s distracted screaming as if under torture.  “It hurts!  It hurts!  It hurts!” I hesitated just an instant, half a second, no more, but before I could open the door wide there was in the hall a short groan and the sound of a heavy fall.

The sight of Ortega lying on his back at the foot of the stairs arrested me in the doorway.  One of his legs was drawn up, the other extended fully, his foot very near the pedestal of the silver statuette holding the feeble and tenacious gleam which made the shadows so heavy in that hall.  One of his arms lay across his breast.  The other arm was extended full length on the white-and-black pavement with the hand palm upwards and the fingers rigidly spread out.  The shadow of the lowest step slanted across his face but one whisker and part of his chin could be made out.  He appeared strangely flattened.  He didn’t move at all.  He was in his