the moment all considerations of ways and means and
risks and difficulties. Its tremendous intensity robbed it of all
direction and left me adrift in the big black-and-white hall as on a
silent sea. It was not, properly speaking, irresolution. It was merely
hesitation as to the next immediate step, and that step even of no great
importance: hesitation merely as to the best way I could spend the rest
of the night. I didn't think further forward for many reasons, more or
less optimistic, but mainly because I have no homicidal vein in my
composition. The disposition to gloat over homicide was in that
miserable creature in the studio, the potential Jacobin; in that
confounded buyer of agricultural produce, the punctual employe of
Hernandez Brothers, the jealous wretch with an obscene tongue and an
imagination of the same kind to drive him mad. I thought of him without
pity but also without contempt. I reflected that there were no means of
sending a warning to Dona Rita in Tolosa; for of course no postal
communication existed with the Headquarters. And moreover what would a
warning be worth in this particular case, supposing it would reach her,
that she would believe it, and that she would know what to do? How could
I communicate to another that certitude which was in my mind, the more
absolute because without proofs that one could produce?

The last expression of Rose's distress rang again in my ears: "Madame has
no friends. Not one!" and I saw Dona Rita's complete loneliness beset by
all sorts of insincerities, surrounded by pitfalls; her greatest dangers
within herself, in her generosity, in her fears, in her courage, too.
What I had to do first of all was to stop that wretch at all costs. I
became aware of a great mistrust of Therese. I didn't want her to find
me in the hall, but I was reluctant to go upstairs to my rooms from an
unreasonable feeling that there I would be too much out of the way; not
sufficiently on the spot. There was the alternative of a live-long night
of watching outside, before the dark front of the house. It was a most
distasteful prospect. And then it occurred to me that Blunt's former
room would be an extremely good place to keep a watch from. I knew that
room. When Henry Allegre gave the house to Rita in the early days (long
before he made his will) he had planned a complete renovation and this
room had been meant for the drawing-room. Furniture had been made for it
specially,