After leaving Unorna at the convent, the Wanderer had not hesitated as to the course he should pursue. It was quite clear that the only person to whom he could apply at the present juncture was Keyork Arabian. Had he been at liberty to act in the most natural and simple way, he would have applied to the authorities for a sufficient force with which to take Israel Kafka into custody as a dangerous lunatic. He was well aware, however, that such a proceeding must lead to an inquiry of a more or less public nature, of which the consequences might be serious, or at least extremely annoying, to Unorna. Of the inconvenience to which he might himself be exposed, he would have taken little account, though his position would have been as difficult to explain as any situation could be. The important point was to prevent the possibility of Unorna’s name being connected with an open scandal. Every present circumstance in the case was directly or indirectly the result of Unorna’s unreasoning passion for himself, and it was clearly his duty, as a man of honour, to shield her from the consequences of her own acts, as far as lay in his power. He did not indeed believe literally all that she had told him in her mad confession. Much of that, he was convinced, was but a delusion. It might be possible, indeed, for Unorna to produce forgetfulness of such a dream as she impressed upon Kafka’s mind in the cemetery that same afternoon, or even, perhaps, of some real circumstance of merely relative importance in a man’s life; but the Wanderer could not believe that it was in her power to destroy the memory of the great passion through which she pretended that he himself had passed. He smiled at the idea, for he had always trusted his own senses and his own memory. Unorna’s own mind was clearly wandering, or else she had invented the story, supposing him credulous enough to believe it. In either case it did not deserve a moment’s consideration except as showing to what lengths her foolish and ill-bestowed love could lead her. Meanwhile she was in danger. She had aroused the violent and deadly resentment of Israel Kafka, a man who, if not positively insane, as Keyork Arabian had hinted, was by no means in a normal state of mind or body, a man beside himself with love and anger, and absolutely reckless of life for the time being, a man who, for the security of all concerned, must be at least temporarily confined in a place of safety, until a proper treatment and the lapse of a certain length of time should bring him to his senses. For the present, he was wholly untractable, being at the mercy of the most uncontrolled passions and of one of those intermittent phases of blind fatalism to which the Semitic races are peculiarly subject.