s muttering. For myself I had not the slightest doubt of my own
sanity. It was proved to me by the way I could apply my intelligence to
the problem of what was to be done with Senor Ortega. Generally, he was
unfit to be trusted with any mission whatever. The unstability of his
temper was sure to get him into a scrape. Of course carrying a letter to
Headquarters was not a very complicated matter; and as to that I would
have trusted willingly a properly trained dog. My private letter to Dona
Rita, the wonderful, the unique letter of farewell, I had given up for
the present. Naturally I thought of the Ortega problem mainly in the
terms of Dona Rita's safety. Her image presided at every council, at
every conflict of my mind, and dominated every faculty of my senses. It
floated before my eyes, it touched my elbow, it guarded my right side and
my left side; my ears seemed to catch the sound of her footsteps behind
me, she enveloped me with passing whiffs of warmth and perfume, with
filmy touches of the hair on my face. She penetrated me, my head was
full of her . . . And his head, too, I thought suddenly with a side
glance at my companion. He walked quietly with hunched-up shoulders
carrying his little hand-bag and he looked the most commonplace figure
imaginable.

Yes. There was between us a most horrible fellowship; the association of
his crazy torture with the sublime suffering of my passion. We hadn't
been a quarter of an hour together when that woman had surged up fatally
between us; between this miserable wretch and myself. We were haunted by
the same image. But I was sane! I was sane! Not because I was certain
that the fellow must not be allowed to go to Tolosa, but because I was
perfectly alive to the difficulty of stopping him from going there, since
the decision was absolutely in the hands of Baron H.

If I were to go early in the morning and tell that fat, bilious man:
"Look here, your Ortega's mad," he would certainly think at once that I
was, get very frightened, and . . . one couldn't tell what course he
would take. He would eliminate me somehow out of the affair. And yet I
could not let the fellow proceed to where Dona Rita was, because,
obviously, he had been molesting her, had filled her with uneasiness and
even alarm, was an unhappy element and a disturbing influence in her
life--incredible as the thing appeared! I couldn't let him go on to make
himself a worry and a nuisance, drive her o