in this tone of appeal. And yet she
remained as touching and helpless as a distressed child. It had all the
simplicity and depth of a child's emotion. It tugged at one's
heart-strings in the same direct way. But what could one do? How could
one soothe her? It was impossible to pat her on the head, take her on
the knee, give her a chocolate or show her a picture-book. I found
myself absolutely without resource. Completely at a loss.

"Yes, Ortega. Well, what of it?" I whispered with immense assurance.

CHAPTER VII

My brain was in a whirl. I am safe to say that at this precise moment
there was nobody completely sane in the house. Setting apart Therese and
Ortega, both in the grip of unspeakable passions, all the moral economy
of Dona Rita had gone to pieces. Everything was gone except her strong
sense of life with all its implied menaces. The woman was a mere chaos
of sensations and vitality. I, too, suffered most from inability to get
hold of some fundamental thought. The one on which I could best build
some hopes was the thought that, of course, Ortega did not know anything.
I whispered this into the ear of Dona Rita, into her precious, her
beautifully shaped ear.

But she shook her head, very much like an inconsolable child and very
much with a child's complete pessimism she murmured, "Therese has told
him."

The words, "Oh, nonsense," never passed my lips, because I could not
cheat myself into denying that there had been a noise; and that the noise
was in the fencing-room. I knew that room. There was nothing there that
by the wildest stretch of imagination could be conceived as falling with
that particular sound. There was a table with a tall strip of
looking-glass above it at one end; but since Blunt took away his
campaigning kit there was no small object of any sort on the console or
anywhere else that could have been jarred off in some mysterious manner.
Along one of the walls there was the whole complicated apparatus of solid
brass pipes, and quite close to it an enormous bath sunk into the floor.
The greatest part of the room along its whole length was covered with
matting and had nothing else but a long, narrow leather-upholstered bench
fixed to the wall. And that was all. And the door leading to the studio
was locked. And Therese had the key. And it flashed on my mind,
independently of Dona Rita's pessimism, by the force of personal
conviction, that, of course, Therese would te