 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 Doña Rita's
pessimism, by the force of personal conviction, that, of course, Therese would
tell him. I beheld the whole succession of events perfectly connected and
tending to that particular conclusion. Therese would tell him! I could see the
contrasted heads of those two formidable lunatics close together in a dark mist
of whispers compounded of greed, piety, and jealousy, plotting in a sense of
perfect security as if under the very wing of Providence. So at least Therese
would think. She could not be but under the impression that (providentially) I
had been called out for the rest of the night.
    And now there was one sane person in the house, for I had regained complete
command of my thoughts. Working in a logical succession of images they showed me
at last as clearly as a picture on a wall, Therese pressing with fervour the key
into the fevered palm of the rich, prestigious, virtuous cousin, so that he
should go and urge his self-sacrificing offer to Rita, and gain merit before Him
whose Eye sees all the actions of men. And this image of those two with the key
in the studio seemed to me a most monstrous conception of fanaticism, of a
perfectly horrible aberration. For who could mistake the state that made José
Ortega the figure he was, inspiring both pity and fear? I could not deny that I
understood, not the full extent but
