elf earnestly: "What on earth am I going to do with
him?" That exclusive preoccupation of my mind was as dangerous to Senor
Ortega as typhoid fever would have been. It strikes me that this
comparison is very exact. People recover from typhoid fever, but
generally the chance is considered poor. This was precisely his case.
His chance was poor; though I had no more animosity towards him than a
virulent disease has against the victim it lays low. He really would
have nothing to reproach me with; he had run up against me, unwittingly,
as a man enters an infected place, and now he was very ill, very ill
indeed. No, I had no plans against him. I had only the feeling that he
was in mortal danger.

I believe that men of the most daring character (and I make no claim to
it) often do shrink from the logical processes of thought. It is only
the devil, they say, that loves logic. But I was not a devil. I was not
even a victim of the devil. It was only that I had given up the
direction of my intelligence before the problem; or rather that the
problem had dispossessed my intelligence and reigned in its stead side by
side with a superstitious awe. A dreadful order seemed to lurk in the
darkest shadows of life. The madness of that Carlist with the soul of a
Jacobin, the vile fears of Baron H., that excellent organizer of
supplies, the contact of their two ferocious stupidities, and last, by a
remote disaster at sea, my love brought into direct contact with the
situation: all that was enough to make one shudder--not at the chance,
but at the design.

For it was my love that was called upon to act here, and nothing else.
And love which elevates us above all safeguards, above restraining
principles, above all littlenesses of self-possession, yet keeps its feet
always firmly on earth, remains marvellously practical in its
suggestions.

I discovered that however much I had imagined I had given up Rita, that
whatever agonies I had gone through, my hope of her had never been lost.
Plucked out, stamped down, torn to shreds, it had remained with me
secret, intact, invincible. Before the danger of the situation it
sprang, full of life, up in arms--the undying child of immortal love.
What incited me was independent of honour and compassion; it was the
prompting of a love supreme, practical, remorseless in its aim; it was
the practical thought that no woman need be counted as lost for ever,
unless she be dead!

This excluded for