"If it had not been for Sarita Castelar, you two would never have quarrelled, and—and all would have been so different." Her lips quivered as she spoke, and her eyes were full of sadness. Her look pained me inexpressibly. I said nothing, and after a pause she added: "You do not think he will let you take her from him? You know him too well for that; although you do not know him yet. What was it he would not let me hear?" "I would rather you heard it from him. And I must go." She had roused my fears for Sarita. "I thought he meditated some act of violence against you, and he is headstrong enough to do anything—even against her." "You can surely prevent that," I cried, quickly, in alarm. "You were strong to save me." The look with which she answered me lives in my memory to this hour. Then she drew her hands from mine, and said coldly— "I can do nothing. You have made him desperate." And with a change of tone, after a slight pause, as though excusing her own hardness of thought and resolve, she added: "Besides, I do not know where she is; so I _can_ do nothing, even if I would." With that I left her, and hurried from the house a prey to innumerable harassing fears, the stings and darts of which sent me plunging headlong through the streets to go I did not think where, and to do I did not know what. Sarita was in imminent peril from that reckless, desperate man, and I alone had to save her. More than once I halted undecided whether to return and take up the challenge he had thrown down, and trust to my own strength and skill to render him powerless to harm her. And in this bewildered state of mind I found myself at the door of my old dwelling, half crazed by the thought that hours at least must elapse before I could use hand or tongue for her protection, and that for all those hours she would be absolutely at his mercy. *CHAPTER XXX* *SUSPENSE* The moment I entered my rooms I perceived that they had been ransacked. The trail of the police searchers lay over everything. In his eagerness to regain possession of that compromising document which he feared so acutely, Quesada had turned his agents loose in my rooms; and they had done their work so thoroughly that the condition of the place was a silent but most impressive tribute to their skill and his alarm. The rooms had been searched from wall to wall; my trunks had been broken and overhauled; drawers and cupboards had been forced, and the contents diligently scrutinised; not a thing had been left in its proper place; and I smiled with a feeling of grim pleasure that I had had the forethought to put the papers in the safe hands of my friend Mayhew. For the action of the police I cared nothing, and I stayed in the place only long enough to get such clothes as I might need; and I threw them into a Gladstone bag, and carried them over to Mayhew’s rooms.