And she went and stood by Cousin Peligros with her hand upon her shoulder
as if to protect her. She shook her head gravely at Marcos.

Cousin Peligros rose rigidly and walked towards the door.

"I will go," she said. "I will see that your room is in order. I have
never before been made an object of ridicule in a gentleman's house."

"But we may surely laugh and be happy in a gentleman's house, may we
not?" cried Juanita, running after her, and throwing one arm round her
rather unbending and capacious waist. "You are an old dear, and you must
not be so solemn about it. Marcos and I are only married for fun, you
know."

And the door closed behind them, shutting off Juanita's voluble
explanations.

"You see," said Sarrion, after a pause. "She is happy enough."

"Now," answered Marcos. "But she may find out some day that she is not."

Juanita came back before long and found Sarrion alone.

"Where is Marcos?" she asked.

"He is taking a siesta," answered Sarrion.

"Like a poor man."

"Yes, like a poor man. He was not in bed all last night. You had a
narrower escape of being made a nun than you suspect."

Juanita's face fell. She went to the window and stood there looking out.

"When are we going to Torre Garda?" she asked, after a long silence. "I
hate towns ... and people. I want to smell the pines ... and the
bracken."

CHAPTER XX

AT TORRE GARDA

The river known as the Wolf finds its source in the eternal snows of the
Pyrenees. Amid the solitary grandeur of the least known mountains in
Europe it rolls and tumbles--tossed hither and thither in its rocky bed,
fed by this and that streamlet from stony gorges--down to the green
valley of Torre Garda.

Here there is a village crouched on either side of the river-bed, and
above it on a plateau surrounded by chestnut trees and pines, stands the
house of the Sarrions. In winter the wholesome smell of wood smoke rising
from the chimneys pervades the air. In summer the warm breath of the
pines creeps down the mountains to mingle with the cooler air that stirs
the bracken.

Below all, summer and winter, at evening and at dawn, night and day,
growls the Wolf--so named from the continuous low-pitched murmur of its
waters through the defile a mile below the village. The men of the valley
of the Wolf have a hundred tales of their river in its different moods,
and firmly believe that the voice which is ever in their ears speaks to
such as have understanding, of every change in the weather. The old women
have no doubt that it speaks also of those things that must affect the
prince and the peasant alike; of good and ill fortune; of life and of
death; of hope and its slow, slow dying in the heart. Certain it is that
the river had its humours not to be accounted for by outward
things--seeming to be gay without reason, like any human heart, in dull
weather, and murmuring dismally when the sun shone and the birds were
singing in the trees.

In clearest summer weather, the water would sometimes run thick and
yellow for days, the result of some landslip where the snow and ice were
melting. Sometimes the Wolf would hurl down a mass of debris--a forest
torn from the mountainside by avalanche, the dead bodies of a few stray
sheep, or a fox or a wolf or the dun corpse of a mountain bear. Many in
the valley had seen tables and chairs and the roof, perhaps, of a house
caught in the timbers of the old bridge below the village. And the river,
of course, had exacted its toll from more than one family. It was
jocularly said at the Venta that the Wolf was Royalist; for in the first
Carlist war it had fought for Queen Christina, doing to death a whole
company of insurgents at that which is known as the False Ford, where it
would seem that a child could pass while in reality no horseman might
hope to get through.

The house of Torre Garda was not itself ancient though it undoubtedly
stood on the site of some mediaeval watch-tower. It had been built in the
days of Ferdinand VII at the period when French architecture was running
rife over the world, and had the appearance of a Gascon chateau. It was a
long low house of two stories. Every room on the ground floor opened with
long French windows to a terrace built to the edge of the plateau, where
a fountain splashed its clear spring water into a stone basin, where gray
stone urns stood on lichen-covered pillars amid flower-beds.

Every room on the first floor had windows opening on a wide balcony which
ran the length of the house and was protected from the rain and midday
sun by the far-stretching eaves of the roof. The house was of gray stone,
roofed with slabs of the same, such as peel off the slopes of the
Pyrenees and slide one over the other to the valleys below. The pointed
turrets at each corner were roofed with the small green tiles that the
Moors loved. The winds and the snow and the rain had toned all Torre
Garda down to a cool gray-green against which the four cypress trees on
the terrace stood rigid like sentinels keeping eternal guard over the
valley.

Above the house rose a pine-slope where the snow lingered late into the
summer. Above this again were rocks and broken declivities of sliding
stones; and, crowning all, the everlasting snow.

From the terrace of Torre Garda a strong voice could make itself heard in
the valley where tobacco grew and ripened, or on the height where no
vegetation lived at all. The house seemed to hang between sky and earth,
and the air that moved the cypress trees was cool and thin--a very breath
of heaven to make thinkers wonder why any who can help it should choose
to live in towns.

The green shutters had been closed across the windows for nearly three
months, when on one spring morning the villagers looked up to see the
house astir and the windows opened wide.

There had been much to detain the Sarrions at Saragossa and Juanita had
to wait for the gratification of her desire to smell the pines and the
bracken again.

It seemed that it was no one's business to question the validity of the
strange marriage in the chapel of Our Lady of the Shadows. Evasio Mon who
was supposed to know more about it than any other, only smiled and said
nothing. Leon de Mogente was absorbed in his own peculiar selfishness
which was not of this world but the next. He fell into the mistake common
to ecstatic minds that thoughts of Heaven justify a deliberate neglect of
obvious duties on earth.

"Leon," said Juanita gaily to Cousin Peligros, "will assuredly be a saint
some day: he has so little sense of humour."

For Leon it seemed could not be brought to understand Juanita's sunny
view of life.

"You may look solemn and talk of great mistakes as much as you like," she
said to her brother. "But I know I was never meant for a nun. It will all
come right in the end. Uncle Ramon says so. I don't know what he means.
But he says it will all come right in the end."

And she shook her head with that wisdom of the world which is given to
women only; which may live in the same heart as ignorance and innocence
and yet be superior to all the knowledge that all the sages have ever put
in books.

There were lawyers to be consulted and moreover paid, and Juanita gaily
splashed down her name in a bold schoolgirl hand on countless documents.

There is a Spanish proverb warning the unwary never to drink water in the
dark or sign a paper unread. And Marcos made Juanita read everything she
signed. She was quick enough, and only laughed when he protested that she
had not taken in the full meaning of the document.

"I understand it quite enough," she answered. "It is not worth troubling
about. It is only money. You men think of nothing else. I do not want to
understand it any better."

"Not now; but some day you will."

Juanita looked at him, pen in hand, momentarily grave.

"You are always thinking of what I shall do ... some day," she said.

And Marcos did not deny it.

"You seem to hedge me around with precautions against that time," she
continued, thoughtfully, and looked at him with bright and searching
eyes.

At length all the formalities were over, and they were free to go to
Torre Garda. Events were moving rapidly in Spain at this time, and the
small wonder of Juanita's marriage was already a thing half forgotten.
Had it not been for her great wealth the whole matter would have passed
unnoticed; for wealth is still a burden upon its owners, and there are
many who must perforce go away sorrowful on account of their great
possessions. Half the world guessed, however, at the truth, and every man
judged the Sarrions from his own political standpoint, praising or
blaming according to preconceived convictions. But there were some in
high places who knew that a great danger had been averted.

Cousin Peligros had consented to Sarrion's proposal that she should for a
time make her home with him, either at Torre Garda or at Saragossa. She
had lived in troublous times, but was convinced that the Carlists, like
Heaven, made special provision for ladies.

"No one," said she, "will molest me," and she folded her hands in
complacent serenity on her lap.

She had a profound distrust of railways, in which common mode of
conveyance she suspected a democratic spirit, though to this day the
Spanish ticket collector presents himself, hat in hand, at the door of a
first-class carriage, and the time-table finds itself subservient to the
convenience of any Excellency who may not have finished his coffee in the
refreshment-room.

Cousin Peligros was therefore glad enough to quit the train at Pampeluna,
where the carriage from Torre Garda awaited them. There were saddle
horses for Sarrion and Marcos, and a handful of troops were waiting in
the shadow of the trees outside of the station yard. An officer rode
forward and paid his respects to Juanita.

"You do not recognise me, Senorita," he said. "You remember the chapel of
Our Lady of the Shadows?"

"Yes. I remember," she answered, shaking hands. "We caught you saying
your prayers when we arrived."

He blushed as he laughed; for he was a simple man leading a hard and
lonely life.

"Yes, Senorita; why not?"

"I have no doubt," said Juanita, looking at him shrewdly, "that the
saints heard you."

"Marcos," he explained, "wrote to ask me for a few men to take your
carriage through the danger zone. So I took the liberty of riding with
them myself. I am the watch-dog, Señorita, at the gate of your valley.
You are safe enough once you are within the valley of the Wolf."

They talked together until Sarrion rode forward to announce that all were
ready to depart, while Cousin Peligros sat with pinched lips and
disapproving face. She took an early opportunity of mentioning that
ladies should not talk to gentlemen with such familiarity and freedom;
that, above all, a smile was sufficient acknowledgment for any jest
except those made by the very aged, when to laugh was a sign of respect.
For Cousin Peligros had been brought up in a school of manners now
fortunately extinct.

"He is Marcos' friend," explained Juanita. "Besides, he is a nice person.
I know a nice person when I see one," she concluded, with a friendly nod
towards the watch-dog of the valley of the Wolf, who was talking in the
shade of the trees with Marcos.

The men rode together in advance of the carriages and the luggage carts.
The journey was uneventful, and the sun was setting in a cloudless west
when the mouth of the valley was reached. It was Cousin Peligros' happy
lot to consider herself the centre of any party and the pivot upon which
social events must turn. She bowed graciously to Captain Zeneta when he
came forward to take his leave.

"It was most considerate of Marcos," she said to Juanita in his hearing,
"to provide this escort. He no doubt divined that, accustomed as I am to
living in Madrid, I might have been nervous in these remote places."

Juanita was tired. They were near their journey's end. She did not take
the trouble to explain the situation to Cousin Peligros. There are some
fools whom the world allows to continue in their folly because it is less
trouble. Marcos and Sarrion were riding together now in silence. From
time to time a peasant waiting at the roadside came forward to exchange a
few words with one or the other. The road ascended sharply now, and the
pace was slow. The regular tramp of the horses, the quiet evening hour,
the fatigue of the journey were conducive to contemplation and silence.

When Marcos helped Cousin Peligros and Juanita to descend from the
high-swung traveling carriage, Juanita was too tired to notice one or two
innovations. When, as a schoolgirl, she had spent her holidays at Torre
Garde no change had been made in the simple household. But now Marcos had
sent from Saragossa such modern furniture as women need to-day. There
were new chairs on the terrace. Her own bedroom at the western corner of
the house, next door to the huge room occupied by Sarrion, had been
entirely refurnished and newly decorated.

"Oh, how pretty!" she exclaimed, and Marcos lingering in the long passage
perhaps heard the remark.

Later, when they were all in the drawing-room awaiting dinner, Juanita
clasped Sarrion's arm with her wonted little gesture of affection.

"You are an old dear," she said to him, "to have my room done up so
beautifully, so clean, and white, and simple--just as you know I should
like it. Oh, you need not smile so grimly. You know it was just what I
should like--did he not, Marcos?"

"Yes," answered Marcos.

"And it is the only room in the house that has been done. I looked into
the others to see--into your great barrack, and into Marcos' room at the
end of the balcony. I have guessed why Marcos has that room ..."

"Why?" he asked.

"So that you can see down the valley--so that Perro who sleeps on the
balcony outside the open window has merely to lift his head to look right
down to where the other watch-dogs are, ten miles away."

After dinner, Juanita discovered that there was a new piano in the
drawing-room, in addition to a number of those easier chairs which our
grandmothers never knew. Cousin Peligros protested that they were
unnecessary and even conducive to sloth and indolence. Still protesting,
she took the most comfortable and sat with folded hands listening to
Juanita finding out the latest waltz, with variations of her own, on the
new piano.

Sarrion and Marcos were on the terrace smoking. The small new moon was
nearing the west. The night would be dark after its setting. They were
silent, listening to the voice of their ancestral river as it growled,
heavy with snow, through the defile. Presently a servant brought coffee
and told Marcos that a messenger was waiting to deliver a note. After the
manner of Spain the messenger was invited to come and deliver his letter
in person. He was a traveling knife-grinder, he explained, and had
received the letter from a man on the road whose horse had gone lame. One
must be mutually helpful on the road.

The letter was from Zeneta at the end of the valley; written hastily in
pencil. The Carlists were in force between him and Pampeluna; would
Marcos ride down to the camp and hear details?

Marcos rose at once and threw his cigarette away. He looked towards the
lighted windows of the drawing-room.

"No good saying anything about it," he said. "I shall be back by
breakfast time. They will probably not notice my absence."

He was gone--the sound of his horse's feet was drowned in the voice of
the river--before Juanita came out to the terrace, a slim shadowy form in
her white evening dress. She stood for a minute or two in silence, until,
her eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness, she perceived Sarrion and
an empty chair. Perro usually walked gravely to her and stood in front of
her awaiting a jest whenever she came. She looked round. Perro was not
there.

"Where is Marcos?" she asked, taking the empty chair.

"He has been sent for to the valley. He has gone."

"Gone!" echoed Juanita, standing up again. She went to the stone
balustrade of the terrace and looked over into the darkness.

"I heard him cross the bridge a few minutes ago," Sarrion said quietly.

"He might have said good-bye."

Sarrion turned slowly in his chair and looked at her.

"He probably did not wish his comings and goings to be talked of by
Cousin Peligros," he suggested.

"Still, he might have said good-bye ... to me."

She turned again and leaning her arms on the gray stone she stood in
silence looking down into the valley.

CHAPTER XXI

JUANITA GROWS UP
Marcos' horse, the Moor, had performed the journey to Pampeluna once in
the last twelve hours. He was a strong horse accustomed to long journeys.
But Marcos chose another, an older and staider animal of less value,
better fitted for night work.

He wished to do the journey quickly and return by breakfast-time; he was
not in a mood to spare his beast. Men who live in stirring times and meet
death face to face quite familiarly from day to day, as Englishmen meet
the rain, soon acquire the philosophy which consists in taking the good
things the gods send them, unhesitatingly and thankfully.

Juanita was at Torre Garda at last--after months of patient waiting and
watching, after dangers foreseen and faced--that was enough for Marcos de
Sarrion.

He therefore pressed his horse. Although he was alert and watchful
because it was his habit to be so, he was less careful perhaps than
usual; he rode at a greater pace than was prudent on such a road, by so
dark a night.

The spring comes early on the Southern slope of the Pyrenees. It was a
warm night and there had been no rain for some days. The dust lay thickly
on the road, muffling the beat of the horse's feet. The Wolf roared in
its narrow bed. The road, only recently made practicable for carriages at
Sarrion's expense, was not a safe one. It hung like a cornice on the
left-hand bank of the river and at certain corners the stones fell from
the mountain heights almost continuously. In other places the heavy stone
buttresses had been undermined by the action of the river. It was a road
that needed continuous watching and repair. But Marcos had ridden over it
a few hours earlier and there had been no change of weather since.

He knew the weak places and passed them carefully. Three miles below the
village, the river passes through a gorge and the road mounts to the lip
of the overhanging cliffs. There is no danger here; for there are no
falling stones from above. It is to this passage that the Wolf owes its
name and in a narrow place invisible from the road the water seems to
growl after the manner of a wild beast at meat.

Marcos' horse knew the road well enough, which, moreover, was easy here.
For it is cut from the rock on the left-hand side, while its outer
boundary is marked at intervals by white stones. The horse was perhaps
too cautious. By night a rider must leave to his mount the decision as to
what hills may be descended at a trot. Marcos knew that the old horse
beneath him invariably decided to walk down the easiest declivity. At the
summit of the road the horse was trotting at a long, regular stride. On
the turn of the hill he proposed to stop, although he must have known
that the descent was easy. Marcos touched him with the spur and he
started forward. The next instant he fell so suddenly and badly that his
forehead scraped the road.

Marcos was thrown so hard and so far that he fell on his head and
shoulder three feet in front of the horse. It was the narrowest place in
the whole road, and the knowledge of this flashed through Marcos' mind as
he fell. He struck one of the white stones that mark the boundary of the
road, and heard his collar-bone snap like a dry stick. Then he rolled
over the edge of the precipice into the blackness filled by the roar of
the river.

He still had one hand whole and ready, though the skin was scraped from
it, and the fingers of this hand were firmly twisted into the bridle. He
hung for a moment jerked hither and thither by the efforts of the horse
to pick himself up on the road above. A stronger jerk lifted him to the
edge of the road, and Marcos, hanging there for an instant, found an
insecure foothold for one foot in the root of an overhanging bush. But
the horse was nearer to the edge now; he was half over and might fall at
any moment.

It flashed through Marcos' mind that he must live at all costs. There was
no one to care for Juanita in the troubled times that were coming.
Juanita was his only thought. And he fought for his life with skill and
that quickness of perception which is the real secret of success in human
affairs.

He jerked on the bridle with all the strength of his iron muscle; jerked
himself up on the road and the horse over into the gorge. As the horse
fell it lashed out wildly; its hind foot touched the back of Marcos' head
and seemed almost to break his spine.

He rolled over on his side, choking. He did not lose consciousness at
once, but knew that oblivion was coming. Perro, the dog, had been
excitedly skirmishing round, keeping clear of the horse's heels and doing
little else. He now looked over after the horse and Marcos saw his lean
body outlined against the sky. He had let the reins go and found that he
was grasping a stone in his bleeding fingers instead. He threw the stone
at Perro and hit him. The surprised yelp was the last sound he heard as
the night of unconsciousness closed over him.

Juanita had gone to bed very tired. She slept the profound sleep of youth
and physical fatigue for an hour. In the ordinary way she would have
slept thus all night. But at midnight she found herself wide-awake again.
The first fatigue of the body was past, and the busy mind asserted its
rights again. She was not conscious of having anything to think about.
But the moment she was half awake the thoughts leapt into her mind and
awoke her completely.

She remembered again the startling silence of Torre Garda, which was in
some degree intensified by the low voice of the river. She lifted her
head to listen and caught her breath at the instant realisation of the
sound quite near at hand. It was the patter of feet on the terrace below
her window. Perro had returned. Marcos must therefore be back again. She
dropped her head sleepily on the pillow, expecting to hear some sound in
the house indicative of Marcos' return, but not intending to lie awake to
listen for it.

She did not fall asleep again, however, and Perro continued to patter
about on the terrace below as if he were going from window to window
seeking an entrance. Juanita began to listen to his movements, expecting
him to whimper, and in a few moments he fulfilled her anticipation by
giving a little uneasy sound between his teeth. In a moment Juanita was
out of bed and at the open window. Perro would awake Sarrion and Marcos,
who must be very tired. It was a woman's instinct. Juanita was growing
up.

Perro heard her, and in obedience to her whispered injunction stood
still, looking up at her and wagging his uncouth tail slowly. But he gave
forth the uneasy sound again between his teeth.

Juanita went back into her room; found her slippers and dressing-gown.
But she did not light a candle. She had acquired a certain familiarity
with the night from Marcos, and it seemed natural at Torre Garda to fall
into the habits of those who lived there. She went the whole length of
the balcony to Marcos' room, which was at the other end of the house,
while Perro conscientiously kept pace with her on the terrace below.

Marcos' window was shut, which meant that he was not there. When he was
at home his window stood open by night or day, winter or summer.

Juanita returned to Sarrion's room, which was next to her own. The window
was ajar. The Spaniards have the habit of the open air more than any
other nation of Europe. She pushed the window open.

"Uncle Ramon," she whispered. But Sarrion was asleep. She went into the
room, which was large and sparsely furnished, and, finding the bed, shook
him by the shoulder.

"Uncle Ramon," she said, "Perro has come back ... alone."

"That is nothing," he replied, reassuringly, at once. "Marcos, no doubt,
sent him home. Go back to bed."

She obeyed him, going slowly back to the open window. But she paused
there.

"Listen," she said, with an uneasy laugh. "He has something on his mind.
He is whimpering. That is why I woke you."

"He often whimpers when Marcos is away. Tell him to be quiet, and then go
back to bed," said Sarrion.

She obeyed him, setting the window and the jalousie ajar after her as she
had found them. But Sarrion did not go to sleep again. He listened for
some time. Perro was still pattering to and fro on the terrace, giving
from time to time his little plaint of uneasiness between his closed
teeth.

At length Sarrion rose and struck a light. It was one o'clock. He dressed
quickly and noiselessly and went down-stairs, candle in hand. The stable
at Torre Garda stands at the side of the house, a few feet behind it
against the hillside. In this remote spot, with but one egress to the
outer world, bolts and locks are not considered a necessity of life.
Sarrion opened the door of the house where the grooms and their families
lived, and went in.

In a few moments he returned to the stable-yard, accompanied by the man
who had driven Juanita and Cousin Peligros from Pampeluna a few hours
earlier. Together they got out the same carriage and a pair of horses. By
the light of a stable lantern they adjusted the harness. Then Sarrion
returned to the house for his cloak and hat. He brought with him Marcos'
rifle which stood in a rack in the hall and laid it on the seat of the
carriage. The man was already on the box, yawning audibly and without
restraint.

As Sarrion seated himself in the carriage he glanced upwards. Juanita was
standing on the balcony, at the corner by Marcos' window, looking down at
him, watching him silently. Perro was already out of the gate in the
darkness, leading the way.

They were not long absent. Perro was no genius, but what he did know, he
knew thoroughly, which for practical purposes is almost as good. He led
them to the spot little more than three miles down the valley, where
Marcos lay at the side of the road, which is white and dusty. It was
quite easy to perceive the dark form lying there, and Perro's lean limbs
shaking over it.

When the carriage returned Juanita was standing at the open door. She had
lighted the lamp in the hall and carried in her hand a lantern which she
must have found in the kitchen. But she had awakened none of the
servants, and was alone, still in her dressing-gown, with her dark hair
flying in the breeze.

She came forward to the carriage and held up the lantern.

"Is he dead?" she asked quietly.

Sarrion did not answer at once. He was sitting in one corner of the
carriage, with Marcos' head and shoulders resting on his knees.

"I do not know how badly he is hurt," he answered at length. "We called
at the chemist's as we came through the village and awoke him. He has
been an army servant and is as good as a doctor--"

"If the Señorita will hold the horses," interrupted the coachman, pushing
Juanita gently aside, "we will carry him up-stairs."

And something in the man's manner made her think that Marcos was dead.
She was compelled to wait there at least ten minutes, holding the horses.
When at length he returned she did not wait to ask questions, but left
him and ran up-stairs.

In Marcos' room she found Sarrion lighting a lamp. Marcos had been laid
on the bed. She glanced at him, holding her lower lip between her teeth.
His face was covered with dust and blood. One blood-stained hand lay
across his chest, the other was stretched by his side, unnaturally
straight.

Sarrion looked up at her and was about to speak when she forestalled him.

"It is no good telling me to go away," she said, "because I won't."

Then she turned to get a sponge and water. Sarrion was already busy at
Marcos' collar, which he had unbuttoned. Suddenly he changed his mind and
turned away.

"Undo his collar," he said. "I will go down-stairs and get some warm
water."

He took the candle and left Juanita alone with Marcos. She did as she was
told and bent over him. Her fingers had caught in a string fastened round
Marcos' neck. She brought the lamp nearer. It was her own wedding ring,
which she had returned to him after so brief a use of it through the bars
of the little window looking on to the Calle de la Dormitaleria at
Pampeluna.

She tried to undo the knot, but failed to do so. She turned quickly, and
took the scissors from the dressing-table and cut the cord, which was a
piece of old fishing-line, frayed and worn by friction against the rocks
of the river. Juanita hastily thrust the cord into her pocket and drew
the ring less quickly on to that finger for which it had been destined.

When Sarrion returned to the room a minute later she was carefully and
slowly cutting the sleeve of the injured arm.

"Do you know, Uncle Ramon," she said cheerfully, "I am sure--I am
positively certain he will recover, poor old Marcos."

Sarrion glanced at her sharply, as if he had detected a new note in her
voice. And his eye fell on her left hand. He made no answer.

CHAPTER XXII

AN ACCIDENT
Marcos recovered consciousness at daybreak. It was a sign of his great
strength and perfect health that he regained all his faculties at once.
He moved, opened his eyes, and was fully conscious, like a child
awakening from sleep. As soon as his eyes were open they showed surprise;
for Juanita was sitting beside him, watching him.

"Ah!" she said, and rose at once to give him some medicine that stood
ready in a glass. She glanced at the clock as she did so. The room had
been rearranged. It was orderly and simple like a hospital ward.

"Do not try to lift your head," she said. "I will do that for you."

She did it with skill and laid him back again with a gay laugh.

"There," she said. "There is one thing, and one only, that they teach in
covents."

As she spoke she turned to write on a sheet of paper the exact hour and
minute at which he recovered consciousness. For her knowledge was fresh
enough in her mind to be half mechanical in its result.

"Will that drug make me sleep?" asked Marcos, alertly.

"Yes."

"How soon?"

"That depends upon how stale the little apothecary's stock-in-trade may
be," answered Juanita. "Probably a quarter of an hour. He is a queer
little man and unwashed. But he set your collar-bone like an angel. You
have to do nothing but keep quiet. I fancy you will have to be content
with a quiet seat in the background for some weeks, amigo mio."

She busied herself as she spoke, with some duties of a sick-nurse which
had been postponed during his unconsciousness.

"It is nearly six o'clock," she said, without appearing to look in his
direction. "So you need not try to peep round the corner at the clock.
Please do not manage things, Marcos. It is I who am manager of this
affair. You and Uncle Ramon think that I am a child. I am not. I have
grown up--in a night, like a mushroom, and Uncle Ramon has been sent to
bed."

She came and sat down at the bedside again.

"And Cousin Peligros has not been disturbed. She has not left her room.
She will tell us to-morrow morning that she scarcely slept at all. A real
lady never sleeps well, you know. She must have heard us but she did not
come out of her room. For which we may thank the Saints. There are some
people one would rather not have in an emergency. In fact, when you come
to think of it--how many are there in the world whose presence would be
of the slightest use in a crisis--one or two at the most."

She held up her finger to emphasise the smallness of this number, and
withdrew it again, hastily. But she was not quick enough, for Marcos had
seen the ring and his eyes suddenly brightened. She turned away towards
the window, holding her lip between her teeth, as if she had committed an
indiscretion. She had been talking against time slowly and continuously
to prevent his talking or thinking, to give the apothecary's soothing
drug time to take effect. For the little man of medicine had spoken very
clearly of concussion and its after-effects. He had posted off to
Pampeluna to fetch a doctor from there, leaving instructions that should
Marcos recover his reason he should not be permitted to make use of it.

And here in a moment, was Marcos fully in possession of his senses and
making a use of them, which Juanita resented without knowing why.

"I must see my father," he said, stirring the bedclothes, "before I go to
sleep again."

Juanita turned on her heel, but did not approach him or seek to rearrange
the sheets.

"Lie still," she said. "Why do you want to see him? Is it about the war?"

"Yes."

Juanita reflected for a moment.

"Then you had better see him," she said conclusively. "I will go and
fetch him."

She went to the window and passed out on to the balcony. Sarrion had, in
obedience to her wishes, gone to his room. He was now sitting on a long
chair on the balcony, apparently watching the dawn.

"Of what are you thinking as you sit there watching the new light in the
mountains?" she asked gaily.

He looked at her with a softness in the eyes which usually expressed a
tolerant cynicism.

"Of you," he answered. "I heard the murmur of your voices. You need not
tell me that he has recovered consciousness."

"He wants to see you," she said. "I think he was surprised not to see
you--to see only me--when he regained his senses."

There was the faintest suspicion of resentment in her voice.

"But I thought that the apothecary said that he was to be kept absolutely
quiet," said Sarrion, rising.

"So he did. But he is only a man, you know, just like you and Marcos--and
he doesn't understand."

"Oh!" said Sarrion meekly, as he followed her. She led the way into
Marcos' room. She was as fresh and rosy as the morning itself, with the
delicate pink and white of the convent still in her cheeks. It was on
Sarrion's face that the night's work had left its mark.

"Here he is," she said. "He was not asleep. Is it a secret? I suppose it
is--you have so many, you two."

She laughed, and looked from one to the other. But neither answered her.

"Shall I go away, Marcos?" she asked abruptly, turning towards the bed,
as if she knew at all events that from him she would get a plain answer.
And it came, uncompromisingly.

"Yes," he said.

She went to the door with a curt laugh and closed it behind her, with
decision. Sarrion looked after her with a sudden frown. He looked for an
instant as if he were about to suggest that Marcos might have made a
different reply, and then decided to hold his peace. He was perhaps wise
in his generation. Politeness never yet won a woman's love.

Marcos had noted Juanita's lightness of heart. On recovering his senses
the first use he had made of them was to observe her every glance and
silence. There was no sign of present anxiety or of great emotion. The
incident of the ring had no other meaning therefore, than a girlish love
of novelty or a taste not hitherto made manifest, for personal ornament.
It might have deceived any one less observant than Marcos; less in the
habit of watching Nature and dumb animals. He was patient, however, and
industrious in the collection of evidence against himself. And she had
startled him by saying that she was grown-up; though he perceived soon
after, that it was only a manner of speaking; for she was still careless
and happy, without a thought of the future, as children are.

These things, however, he kept to himself. He had not sent for his father
to talk to him of Juanita. Men never discuss a woman in whom they are
really interested, though fools do.

"That horse didn't fall," said Marcos to his father. "He was thrown.
There was a wire across the road."

"There was none when I got there," replied Sarrion.

"Then it had been removed. I saw it as we fell. My foot caught in it or I
could have thrown myself clear in the usual way."

Sarrion reflected a moment.

"Let me look at the note that Zeneta wrote you," he said.

"You will find it in my pocket, hanging behind the door. I was a fool. I
was in too great a hurry. Now that I think of it, Zeneta would not have
written a note like that."

"Then he never wrote it at all," said Sarrion, who had found the paper
and was reading it near the window. The clear morning light brought out
the wrinkles and the crow's-feet with inexorable distinctness on his keen
narrow face.

"What does it mean?" he asked at length, folding the letter and replacing
it in the pocket from which he had taken it.

Marcos roused himself with an effort. He was sleepy.

"I think it means that Evasio Mon is about," he answered.

"No man in the valley would have done it," suggested Sarrion.

"If any man in the valley had done it he would have put his knife into me
when I lay on the road, which would have been murder."

He gave a short laugh and was silent.

"And the hand inside the velvet glove does not risk murder," reflected
Sarrion, "They have not given up the game yet. We must be careful of
ourselves."

"And of Juanita."

"I count her as one of ourselves," replied Sarrion quickly, for he heard
her voice in the passage. With a brief tap on the door she came in. She
was struggling with Perro.

"You have had long enough for your secrets," she said. "And now Marcos
must go to sleep. I have brought Perro to see him. He is so uneasy in his
canine mind."

Perro, low-born and eager, needed restraint to keep him from the bed
where his master lay, and Juanita continued to hold him while she spoke.

"You must remember," she said, "that it is owing to Perro that you are
here at all. If he had not come back and awakened us all you would have
been on the road still."

Sarrion glanced sharply at her, his attention caught by her version of
that which had really happened. She did not want Marcos to know that it
was she who had heard Perro; she, who had insisted that something had
happened to Marcos.

"And some Jesuit coming along the road might have found you there," she
said, "and pushed you over. It would have been so easy."

Marcos and Sarrion glanced at each other, and possibly Juanita saw the
glance as she held Perro back from his master.

"You do not know, Marcos, how they hate you. They could not hate you more
if you were a heretic. I have always known it, because Father Muro was
always trying to find things out about you in confession. He asked
questions about you--who your confessor was; if you did a pilgrimage. I
said--be quiet, Perro!--I said you never did a pilgrimage, and you were
always changing your confessor because no holy father could stand the
strain for long."

She forcibly ejected Perro from the room, and came back breathless and
laughing. "She has not a care in the world," thought Marcos, who knew
well enough the danger that he had passed through.

"But Father Muro is such an innocent old love," she went on, "that he did
it badly. He had been told to do it by the Jesuits and he made a bungle
of it. He thought that he could make a schoolgirl answer a question if
she did not want to. And no one was afraid of him. He is a dear, good,
old saint, and will assuredly go to Heaven. He is not a Jesuit, you know,
but he is afraid of them, as everybody else is, I think--" She paused and
closed the shutters to soften the growing day.

"Except Marcos," she threw back over her shoulder towards the bed, with
some far-off suggestion of anger still in her voice.

"And now he must be allowed to sleep until the doctor comes from
Pampeluna," she concluded.

She left the room as she spoke to warn the servants, who were already
astir, to do their work as noiselessly as possible. When she returned
Marcos was asleep.

"The doctor cannot be here for another hour, at least," whispered
Sarrion, who was standing by the window watching Marcos. "It is too far
for a man of his age to ride, and he has no carriage. There may be some
delay in finding one to do so great a distance at this time in the
morning. You must take the opportunity to get some sleep."

But Juanita only shook her head and laughed.

Sarrion did not persuade her, but turned to quit the room. His hand was
on the door when some one tapped on the other side of it. It was Marcos'
servant.

"The doctor, Excellency," he announced briefly.

In the passage stood a man of middle height, hard and wiry, with those
lines in his face that time neither obliterates nor deepens; the
parallels of hunger. He had been through the first Carlist war nearly
thirty years earlier. He had starved in Pampeluna, the hungry, the
impregnable.

Sarrion shook hands with him and passed into the room.

"Ah!" he said, in the quiet voice of one who is accustomed to speak in
the presence of sleep, when he saw Juanita, "Ah--you!"

"Yes," said Juanita.

"So you are nursing your husband," he murmured abstractedly, as he bent
over the bed.

And Juanita made no answer.

"How long has he been asleep?" he asked, after a few moments, and in
reply received the written paper which he read quickly, with a practised
eye, and laid it aside.

"We must wait," he said, turning to Sarrion, "until he awakes. But it is
all right. I can see that while he sleeps. He is a strong man; none
stronger in all Navarre."

As he spoke, he was examining the bottles left by the village apothecary,
tasting one, smelling another. He nodded approval. In medicine, as in
war, one expert may know unerringly what another will do. Then he looked
round the room, which was orderly as a hospital ward.

"One sees," he said, "that he has a nun to care for him."

He smiled faintly, so that his features fell into the lines that hunger
draws. But Juanita looked at him with grave eyes and did not answer to
his pleasantry.

Then he turned to Sarrion.

"It was only by the kindness of a mere acquaintance," he said, "that I
was enabled to get here so soon. My own horses were tired out with a hard
day yesterday, and I was going out to seek others in Pampeluna--no easy
task on market-day--when I met a travelling carriage on the Plaza de la
Constitution Its owner must have divined my haste, for he offered
assistance, and on hearing my story, and whither I was bound, he gave up
his intended journey, decided to remain a few days longer in Pampeluna
and placed his carriage at my disposal. I hardly know the man at
all--though he tells me that he is an old friend of yours. He lives in
Saragossa."

"Ah!" said Sarrion, who was listening with rather marked attention.

Juanita had moved away, but she was standing now, listening also, looking
back over her shoulder with waiting eyes.

"It was the Senior Evasio Mon," said the doctor. And in the silence that
followed, Marcos stirred in his sleep, as if he, too, had heard the name.

CHAPTER XXIII

KIND INQUIRIES
For the next fortnight Juanita remained in supreme command at Torre
Garda, exercising that rule which she said she had acquired at the
convent school. It had, in reality, come to her straight from Heaven, as
it comes to all women. Is it not part of the gentler soul to care for the
helpless and the sick? Just as it is in a man's heart to fight the world
for a woman's sake.

Marcos made a quick recovery. His broken bones knit together like the
snapped branch of a young tree. His cuts and bruises healed themselves
unaided.

"He has no nerves," said Juanita. "You should see a nun when she is ill!
St. Luke and all the saints have their hands full, I can tell you."

With returning health came energy. Indeed, the patient had never lost his
grip of the world. Many from the valley came to make inquiry. Some left a
message of condolence. Some departed with a grunt, indicative of
satisfaction. A few of the more cultivated gave their names to the
servant as they drank a glass of red wine in the kitchen.

"Say it was Pedro from the mill."

"Tell him that Three Fingered Thomas passed by," muttered another,
grudgingly.

"It is I, so-called Short Knife, who came to ask," explained a third,
tapping the sheath of his baptismal weapon.

"How far have you come?" asked Juanita, who found these gentlemen
entertaining.

"Seventeen miles from the mountain," was the reply.

"All your friends are calling to inquire after your health," said Juanita
to Marcos. "They are famous brigands, and make one think fondly of the
Guardia Civile. There are not many razors in the valley, and I am sure
there is no soap."

"They are honest enough, though their appearance may be disquieting."

"Oh! I am not afraid of them," answered Juanita, with a shrewd and mystic
smile. "It is Cousin Peligros who fears them. She scolded me for speaking
to one of them on the verandah. It undermines the pedestal upon which a
lady should always stand. Am I on a pedestal, Marcos?"

She looked back at him over her shoulder, through the fold of her
mantilla. It was an opportunity, perhaps, which a skillful lover would
have seized. Marcos was silent for a moment. Then he spoke in a repressed
voice.

"If they come again," he said, "I should like to see them."

But Juanita had already put into the apothecary's lips a command that no
visitors should be admitted.

She kept this up for some days, but was at length forced to give way.
Marcos was so obviously on the high road to recovery. There was no
suggestion of an after-effect of the slight concussion of the brain which
had rendered him insensible.

It was Short Knife who first gained admittance to the sick-room. He was
quite a simple person, smelling of sheep, and endowed with a tact which
is as common among the peasantry as amid the great. There was no sign of
embarrassment in his manner, and he omitted to remove his beret from his
close-cropped head until he saw Juanita whom he saluted curtly, replacing
his cap with a calm unconsciousness before he nodded to Marcos.

"It was you I heard singing the Basque songs as I climbed the hill," he
said, addressing Juanita first with the instinct of a gentleman. "You
speak Basque?"

"I understand it, at all events, though I cannot speak it as well as
Marcos."

"Oh, he!" said the man, glancing towards the bed. "He is one of us--one
of us. Do you know the song that the women of the valley sing to their
babies? I cannot sing to you for I have no voice except for the goats.
They are not particular, the goats--they like music. They stand round me
and listen. But if you are passing in the mountain my wife will sing it
to you--she knows it well. We have many round the table--God be thanked.
It makes them sleep when they are contrary. It tells how easy it is to
kill a Frenchman."

Then, having observed the conventionalities, he turned eagerly to Marcos.

Juanita listened to them for a short time while they spoke together in
the Basque tongue. Then she went to the balcony and stood there, leaning
her arms on the iron rail, looking out over the valley with thoughtful
eyes. She had seen clearly a hundred devices to relieve her of her watch
at the bedside. Marcos made excuses for her to absent herself. He found
occupations for her elsewhere. With his returning strength came anxiety
that she should lead her own life--apart from him.

"You need not try to get rid of me," she said to him one day. "And I do
not want to go for a walk with Cousin Peligros. She thinks only of her
shoes and her clothes while she walks. I would go for a walk with Perro
if I went with any one. He has a better understanding of what God made
the world for than Cousin Peligros. But I am not going to walk with any
one, thank you."

Nevertheless she absented herself. And Marcos' attempts to find
diversions for her, ceased with a suspicious suddenness. She fell into
the habit of using the drawing-room which was immediately beneath the
sick-room, and spent much of her time at the piano there.

"It keeps Marcos quiet," she explained airily to Sarrion, and vouchsafed
nothing further on the subject.

Chiefly because the music of Handel and Beethoven alone had been
encouraged by her professors, Juanita had learnt with some enthusiasm the
folk songs of the Basques, considered worthy only of the attention of the
people. She had a pretty voice, round and young with strange low notes in
it that seemed to belong not to her but to some woman who had yet to live
and suffer, or, perhaps, be happy as some few are in this uneven world.
She had caught, moreover, the trick of slurring from one note to the
other, which must assuredly have been left in Spain by the Moors. It
comes from the Far East. It was probably characteristic of those songs
that they could not sing by the waters of Babylon, when they hanged their
harps upon a tree in the strange land. For it gives to songs, sad or gay,
the minor, low clear note of exile. It rings out unexpectedly in strange
places. The boatmen of the Malabar Coast face the surf singing no other
than the refrain that the Basque women murmur over the cradle. "It keeps
Marcos quiet," said Juanita.

"I suppose," she suggested to Marcos one day when she returned to his
room and found him quiet, "that when you are well enough to ride you will
begin your journeys up and down the valley."

"Yes."

"And your endless watch over the Carlists?"

"They are making good use of their time, I hear," replied Marcos, with
the grave appreciation of a good fighter for a worthy foe.

Juanita remembered this now as she stood on the balcony. For he of the
Short Knife and Marcos were talking politics--those rough and ready
politics of the valley of the Wolf, which dealt but little in words and
very considerably in deeds of a bloody nature.

She could hear Marcos talking of the near future when he should be in the
saddle again. And her eyes grew gloomy and dark with those velvet depths
that lie in hazel eyes when they are grave. Her kingdom was slipping away
from her.

She was standing thus when the sound of a horse's feet caught her
attention. A horseman was coming up the slope from the village to the
castle of Torre Garda.

She looked at him with eyes that had been trained by Marcos in the
holiday times to see great distances in the mountains. Then she turned
and reentered the sick man's room.

"There is another visitor coming to make inquiry into your welfare--it is
Senor Mon."

And she looked for the gleam that immediately lighted Marcos' dark eyes.

Sarrion was out. He had ridden to a distant hamlet earlier in the day.
The tidings of this journey might well have reached Evasio Mon's ears.
Cousin Peligros was taking the siesta by which she sought to forestall a
possible fatigue later in the day. There are some people who seem to have
the misfortune to be absent on the rare occasions when they are wanted.

"He is not coming into this room," said Juanita, coolly. "I will go down
and see him."

Evasio Mon greeted her with a gay smile.

"I am so glad," he said, "to hear that all goes well with Marcos. We
heard of his accident at Pampeluna. I had a day of leisure so I rode out
to pay my respects."

He glanced at her, but did not specify whether he had come to pay his
respects to her as a bride or to Marcos as an invalid.

"It is a long way to come for a mere politeness," replied Juanita, who
could meet smile with smile if need be. But the eyes before which Evasio
Mon turned aside were grave enough.

"It is not a mere politeness," he answered. "I have known Marcos since he
was a child; and have watched his progress in the world--not always with
a light heart."

"That is kind of you," replied Juanita. "But why watch him if it gives
you pain?"

Mon laughed. He was quick to see a joke and Juanita, he knew, was a gay
soul.

"One cannot help taking an interest in one's friends and is naturally
sorry to see them drifting..."

"Into what...?" asked Juanita turning to the table where a servant had
placed coffee for the visitor.

"Politics."

"Are politics a crime?"

"They lead to many--but do not let us talk of them--" he broke off with a
light gesture dismissing as it were an unpleasant topic. "Since you are
happy," he concluded, looking at her with benevolent eyes.

He was a man of quick gesture and slow precise speech. He always seemed
to mean much more than was conveyed by the mere words he enunciated.
Juanita looked quickly at him. What did he know of her happiness? Was she
happy--when she came to think of it? She remembered her gloomy thoughts
of a few minutes earlier on the balcony. When we are young we confound
thoughts with facts. When the heart is young it makes for itself a new
heaven and a new earth from a word, a glance, a silence. It is a
different earth from this one, but who can tell that it is not the same
heaven as that for which men look?

Marcos was talking politics in the room overhead, forgetting her perhaps
by now. Evasio Mon's suggestion had come at an opportune moment.

"Leon is much exercised on your account," said Mon, quietly, as if he had
divined her thoughts. It was unlike Leon, perhaps, to be exercised about
anything but his own soul; for he was a very devout man. But Juanita was
not likely to pause and reflect on that point.

"Why?" she asked.

"He naturally dislikes the idea of your being dragged into politics,"
answered Mon, gently.

"I? Why should I be dragged into politics?"

Mon made a deprecatory gesture. It seemed that he found himself drawn
again to speak of a subject that was distasteful to him. Then he shrugged
his shoulders.

"Well," he said, half to himself, "we live in a practical age. Let us be
practical. But he would have preferred that you should marry for love.
Come, let us change the subject, my child. How is Sarrion? In good
health, I hope."

"It is very kind of Leon to exercise his mind on my account," said
Juanita steadily. "But I can manage my own affairs."

"Those are my own words," answered Mon soothingly. "I said to him:
'Juanita is no longer a child; Marcos is honest, he will not have
deceived her; he must have told her that such a marriage is a mere
question of politics; that there is no thought of love.'"

He glanced sharply at her. It was almost prophetic; for Marcos had used
the very words. It is not difficult to be prophetic if one can sink self
sufficiently to cloak one's thoughts with the mind of another and thus
divine the workings of his brain. Juanita remembered that Marcos had told
her that this was a matter of politics. Mon was only guessing; but he
guessed right. The greatest men the world has produced only guessed after
all; but they did not guess wrong.

"Such a fortune as yours," he said, with an easy laugh, "would make or
mar any cause you see. Your fortune is perhaps your misfortune--who
knows?"

Juanita laughed also, as at a pleasant conceit. The wit that had baffled
Father Muro was ready for Evasio Mon. A woman will take her stand before
her own heart and defy the world. Juanita's eyes flashed across the man's
gentle face.

"But," she said, "if the fortune is my own; if I prefer that Marcos
should have it--to the church?"

Evasio Mon smiled gently.

"Of course," he murmured. "That is what I said to Leon, and to Sor Teresa
also, who naturally is troubled about you. Though there are other
alternatives. Neither Marcos nor the Church need have it. You could have
it yourself as your father, my old and dear friend, intended it."

"How could I have it myself?" asked Juanita, whose curiosity was aroused.

Mon shrugged his shoulders.

"The Pope could annul such a marriage as yours by a stroke of the pen if
he wished." He paused, looking at her beneath his light lashes. "And I am
told he does wish it. What the Pope wishes--well, one must try to be a
good Catholic if one can."

Juanita smiled. She did not perhaps consider herself called upon to admit
the infallibility of his Holiness in matters of the heart. She knew
better than the Pope. Mon saw that he had struck a false note.

"I am a sentimentalist myself," he said, with a frank laugh. "I should
like every girl to marry for love. I should like love to be treated as
something sacred--not as a joke. But I am getting to be an old man,
Juanita. I am behind the times. Do I hear Sarrion in the passage?"

He rose as he spoke and went towards the door. Sarrion came in at that
moment. The Spanish sense of hospitality is strongly Arabic. Mon had
ridden many miles. Sarrion greeted him almost eagerly.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE STORMY PETREL
As Juanita quitted the room she heard Sarrion ask Evasio Mon if he had
lunched. And Mon admitted that he had as yet omitted that meal. Juanita
shrugged her shoulders. It is only in later life that we come to realise
the importance of meals. If Mon was hungry he should have said so. She
gave no further thought to him. She hated him. She was glad to think that
he should have suffered, even if his pain was only hunger. What was
hunger, she asked herself, compared with a broken heart? One was a
passing pang that could be alleviated, could be confessed to the first
comer, while a broken heart must be hidden at any cost from all the
world.

She met Cousin Peligros coming towards the drawing-room in her best black
silk dress, and in what might have been called a fluster of excitement at
the thought of a visitor, if such a word had been applicable to her
placid life of self-deception. Juanita made some small jest and laughed
rather eagerly at it as she passed the pattern lady on the stairs.

She was very calm and collected; being a determined person, as many
seemingly gay and light-hearted people are. She was going to leave Torre
Garda and Marcos, who had married her for her money. It is characteristic
of determined people that they are restricted in their foresight. They
look in front with eyes so steady and concentrated that they perceive no
side issues, but only the one path that they intend to tread. Juanita was
going back to Pampeluna, to Sor Teresa at the convent school in the Calle
de la Dormitaleria. She recked nothing of the Carlists, of the disturbed
country through which she had to pass.

She had never lacked money, and had sufficient now for her needs. The
village of Torre Garda could assuredly provide a carriage for the
journey; or, at the worst, a cart. Anything would be better than
remaining in this house--even the hated school in the Calle de la
Dormitaleria. She had always known that Sor Teresa was her friend, though
the Sister Superior's manner of indicating friendship had not been
invariably comprehensible.

Juanita took a cloak and what money she could find. She was not a very
tidy person, and the money had to be collected from odd trinket-boxes and
discarded purses. Marcos was still talking politics with his friend from
the mountains when she passed beneath his window. Sarrion and Evasio Mon
had gone to the dining-room, where, it was to be presumed, Cousin
Peligros had followed them. She professed a great admiration for Evasio
Mon, who was on familiar terms with people of the highest distinction. An
hour's start would be sufficient. In that time she could be half-way to
Pampeluna. Secrecy was of course out of the question.

The drawing-room window was open. Juanita paused on the threshold for a
moment. Then she went into the room and scribbled a hurried note--not
innocent of blots--which she addressed to Marcos. She left it on the
writing-table and carrying her cloak over her arm she hurried down a
zigzag path concealed in a thicket of scrub-oak to the village of Torre
Garda.

Before reaching the village she overtook a traveling-carriage going at a
walking pace down the hill. The carriage, which was old-fashioned in
build, and set high upon its narrow wheels, was empty.

"Where are you going?" asked Juanita, of the man who took off his hat to
her, almost as if he had expected her.

"I am returning to Pampeluna, empty, Excellency," he answered. "I have
brought the baggage of Señor Mon, who is traveling over the mountains on
horseback. I am hoping to get a fare from Torre Garda back to Pampeluna,
if I have the good fortune."

The coincidence was rather startling. Juanita had always been considered
a lucky girl, however; one for whom the smaller chances of daily
existence were invariably kind. She accepted this as another instance of
the indulgence of fate in small things. She was not particularly glad or
surprised. A dull indifference had come over her. The small things of
daily life had never engrossed her mind. She was quite indifferent to
them now. It was her intention to get to Pampeluna, through all
difficulties, and the incidents of the road occupied no place in her
thoughts. She was vaguely confident that no one could absolutely stand in
her way. Had not Evasio Mon said that the Pope would willingly annul her
marriage?

She was thinking these thoughts as she drove through the little mountain
village.

"What is that--it sounds like thunder or guns?" inquired Evasio Mon,
pausing in his late and simple luncheon in the dining-room.

"A clerical ear like yours should not know the sound of guns," replied
Sarrion with a curt laugh. "It is not that, however. It is a cart or a
carriage crossing the bridge below the village."

Mon nodded his head and continued to give his attention to his plate.

"Juanita looks well--and happy," he said, after a pause.

Sarrion looked at him and made no reply. He was borrowing from the absent
Marcos a trick of silence which he knew to be effective in a subtle war
of words.

"Do you not think so?"

"I am sure of it, Evasio."

Sarrion was wondering why he had come to Torre Garda--this stormy petrel
of clerical politics--whose coming never boded good. Mon was much too
wise to be audacious for audacity's sake. He was not a theatrical man,
but one who had worked consistently and steadily for a cause all through
his life. He was too much in earnest to consider effect or heed danger.

"I am not on the winning side, but I am sure that I am on the right one,"
he had once said in public. And the speech went the round of Spain.

After he had finished luncheon he spoke of taking his leave, and asked if
he might be allowed to congratulate Marcos on his escape.

"It should be a warning to him," he went on, "not to ride at night. To do
so is to court mishap in these narrow mountain roads."

"Yes," said Sarrion, slowly.

"Will his nurse allow me to see him?" asked the visitor.

"His nurse is Juanita. I will go and ask her," replied Sarrion, looking
round him quite openly to make sure that there were no letters lying
about on the tables of the terrace that Mon might be tempted to read in
his absence.

He hurried to Marcos' room. Marcos was out of bed. He was dressing, with
the help of his servant and the visitor from the mountains. With a quick
gesture, Marcos indicated the open window, through which the sound of any
exclamation might easily reach the ear of Evasio Mon.

"Juanita has gone," he said, in French. "Read that note. It is his doing,
of course."

"I know now," wrote Juanita, "why you were afraid of my growing up. But I
am grown up--and I have found out why you married me."

"I knew it would come sooner or later," said Marcos, who winced as he
drew his sleeve over his injured arm. He was very quiet and collected, as
people usually are in face of a long anticipated danger which when it
comes at last brings with it a dull sense of relief.

Sarrion made no reply. Perhaps he, too, had anticipated this moment. A
girl is a closed book. Neither knew what might be written in the hidden
pages of Juanita's heart.

A crisis usually serves to accentuate the weakness or strength of a man's
character. Marcos was intensely practical at this moment--more practical
than ever. He had only one thought--the thought that filled his
life--which was Juanita's welfare. If he could not make her happy he
could, at all events, shield her from harm. He could stand between her
and the world.

"She can only have gone down the valley," he said, continuing to speak in
French, which was a second mother tongue to him. "She must have gone to
Sor Teresa. He has induced her to go by some trick. He would not dare to
send her anywhere else."

"I heard a carriage cross the bridge," replied Sarrion. "He heard it
also, and asked what it was. The next moment he spoke of Juanita. The
sound must have put the thought of Juanita into his mind."

"Which means that he provided the carriage. He must have had it waiting
in the village. Whatever he may undertake is always perfectly organised;
we know that. How long ago was that?"

"An hour ago and more."

Marcos nodded and glanced at the clock.

"He will no doubt have made arrangements for her to get safely through to
Pampeluna."

"Then where are you going?" asked Sarrion, perceiving that Marcos was
slipping into his pocket the arm without which he never traveled in the
mountains.

"After her," was the reply.

"To bring her back?"

"No."

Marcos paused for a moment, looking from the window across the valley to
the pine-clad heights with thoughtful eyes. He held odd views--now deemed
chivalrous and old-fashioned--on the question of a woman's liberty to
seek her own happiness in her own way. Such views are unnecessary to-day
when woman is, so to speak, up and fighting. They belong to the days of
our grandmothers, who had less knowledge and much more wisdom; for they
knew that it is always more profitable to receive a gift than demand a
right. The measure will be fuller.

"No. Not unless it is her own wish," he said.

Sarrion made no answer. In human difficulties there is usually nothing to
be said. There is nearly always one clear course to steer and the
deviations are only found by too much talk and too much licence given to
crooked minds. If happiness is not to be found in the straight way
nothing is gained by turning into by-paths to seek it. A few find it and
a great number are not unhappy who have seen it down a side-path and have
yet held their course in the straight way.

"Will you keep him in the library--make the excuse that the sun is too
hot on the verandah--until I am gone?" said Marcos. "I will follow and,
at all events, see that she arrives safely at Pampeluna."

Sarrion gave a curt laugh.

"We may be able," he said, "to turn to good account Evasio's conviction
that you are ill in bed, when in reality you are in the saddle."

"He will soon find out."

"Of course--but in the meantime..."

"Yes," said Marcos with a slow smile ... "in the meantime." He left the
room as he spoke, but turned on the threshold to look back over his
shoulder. His eyes were alight with anger and the smile had lapsed into a
grin.

Sarrion went down to the verandah to entertain the unsought guest.

"They have given us coffee," he said, "in the library. It is too hot in
the sun, although we are still in March! Will you come?"

"And what has Juanita decreed?" asked Mon, when they were seated and
Sarrion had lighted his cigarette.

"The verdict has gone against you," replied Sarrion. "Juanita has decreed
most emphatically that you are not to be allowed to see Marcos."

Mon laughed and spread out his hands with a characteristic gesture of
bland acceptance of the inevitable. The man, it seemed, was a
philosopher; a person, that is to say, who will play to the end a game
which he knows he cannot win.

"Aha!" he laughed. "So we arrive at the point where a woman holds the
casting vote. It is the point to which all men travel. They have always
held the casting vote--ces dames--and we can only bow to the inevitable.
And Juanita is grown up. One sees it. She is beginning to record her
vote."

"Yes," answered Sarrion with a narrow smile. "She is beginning to record
her vote."

With a Spanish formality of manner, Sarrion placed his horse at the
disposition of Evasio Mon, should the traveller feel disposed to pass the
night at Torre Garda. But Mon declined.

"I am a bird of passage," he explained. "I am due in Pampeluna again
to-night. I shall enjoy the ride down the valley now that your
hospitality has so well equipped me for the journey----"

He broke off and looked towards the open window, listening.

Sarrion had also been listening. He had heard the thud of Marcos' horse
as it passed across the wooden bridge below the village.

"Guns again?" he suggested, with a short laugh.

"I certainly heard something," Mon answered. And rising briskly from his
chair, he went to the window. Sarrion followed him, and they stood side
by side looking out over the valley. At that moment that which was more
of a vibration than a sound came to their ears across the mountains--deep
and foreboding.

"I thought I was right," said Mon, in little more than a whisper. "The
Carlists are abroad, my friend, and I, who am a man of peace must get
within the city walls."

With an easy laugh he said good-bye. In a few minutes he was in the
saddle riding leisurely down the valley of the Wolf after Juanita--with
Marcos de Sarrion in between them on the road.

CHAPTER XXV

WAR'S ALARM
Juanita's carriage emerged from the valley of the Wolf into the plain at
sunset. She could see that the driver paid but little heed to his horses.
His attention wandered constantly to the mountains. For, instead of
looking to the road in front, his head was ever to the right, and his
eyes searched the plain and the bare brown hills.

At last he pulled up and, turning on his box, held up one finger.

"Listen, Señorita," he said, and his dark eyes were alight with
excitement.

Juanita stood up and listened, looking westward as he did. The sound was
like the sound of thunder, but shorter and sharper.

"What is it?"

"The Carlists--the sons of dogs!" he answered, with a laugh, and he
shook his whip towards the mountains. "See," he said, gathering up the
reins again, "that dust on the road to the west--that is the troops
marching out from Pampeluna. We are in it again--in it again!"

At the gate of the city there was a crowd of people. The carriage had to
stand aside against the trees to let pass the guns which clattered down
the slope. The men were laughing and shouting to each other. The
officers, erect on their horses, seemed to think only of the safety of
the guns as a woman entering a ballroom reviews her jewelery with a quick
comprehensive glance.

At the guard-house, beneath the second gateway, there occurred another
delay. The driver was a Pampeluna man and well-known to the sentries. But
they did not recognise his passenger and sent for the officer on duty.

"The Señorita Juanita de Mogente," he muttered, as he came into the
road--a stout and grizzled warrior smoking a cigarette. "Ah, yes!" he
said, with a grave bow at the carriage door. "I remember you as a
schoolgirl. I remember now. Forgive the delay and pass in--Señora de
Sarrion."

Juanita was ushered into the little bare waiting-room in the convent
school of the Sisters of the True Faith in the Calle de la Dormitaleria.
It is a small, square apartment at the end of a long and dark passage.
The day filters dimly into it through a barred window no larger than a
pocket-handkerchief. Juanita stood on tiptoe and looked into a narrow
alley. On the sill of this window Marcos had stood to wrench apart the
bars of the window immediately overhead, through which he had lifted her
one cold night--years and years ago, it seemed.

Nothing had changed in this gloomy house.

"The dear Sister Superior is at prayer in the chapel," the doorkeeper had
whispered. The usual formula; for a nun must always be given the benefit
of the doubt. If she is alone in her cell or in the chapel it is always
piously assumed that she is at prayer. Juanita smiled at the familiar
words.

"Then I will wait," she said, "but not very long."

She gave the nun a familiar little nod of warning as if to intimate that
no tricks of the trade need be tried upon her.

She stood alone in the little gray, dim room now, and waited with
brooding eyes. Within, all was quiet with that air of awesome mystery
peculiar to the cloister, which so soon gives place with increasing
familiarity, to a sense of deadly monotony. It is only from outside that
the mystery of the cloister continues to interest. Juanita knew every
stone in this silent house. Its daily round of artificial duties appeared
small to her eyes.

"They have nothing to do all day in a nunnery," she once said to Marcos
in jest. "So they rise up very early in the morning to do it."

She had laughed on first seeing the mark of Marcos' heel on the
window-sill. She turned and looked at it again now--without laughing. And
she thought of Torre Garda with its keen air, cool to the cheek like
spring water; with the scent of the bracken that she loved; with the
tall, still pines, upright against the sky, motionless, whispering with
the wind.

She had always thought that the cloister represented safety and peace in
a world of strife. And now that she was back within the walls she felt
that it was better to be in the world, to take part in the strife, if
necessary; for Heaven had given her a proud and a fierce heart. She would
rather be miserable here all her life than go back to Marcos, who had
dared to marry her without loving her.

The door of the waiting-room opened and Sor Teresa stood on the
threshold.

"I have come back," said Juanita. "I think I shall go into religion. I
have left Torre Garda."

She gave a short laugh and looked curiously at Sor Teresa--impassive in
her straight-hanging robes.

"So you have got me back," she said. "Back to the convent."

"Not to this convent," replied Sor Teresa, quietly.

"But I have come back. I shall come back--the Mother Superior..."

"The Mother Superior is in Saragossa. I am mistress here," replied Sor
Teresa, standing still and dark, like one of the pines at Torre Garda.
The Sarrion blood was rising to her pale cheek. Her eyes glowed darkly
beneath her overshadowing head-dress. Command--that indefinable spirit
which is vouchsafed to gentle people, while rough and strong men miss
it--was written in every line of her face, every fold of her dress, in
the quiet of her small, white hands, resting motionless against her
skirt.

Juanita stood looking at her with flashing eyes, with her head thrown
back, with clenched hands,

"Then I will go somewhere else. But I do not understand you. You always
wanted me to go into religion."

Sor Teresa held up one hand and cut short her speech. For the habit of
obedience is so strong that clear-headed men will deliberately go to
their death rather than relinquish it. The gesture was known to Juanita.
It was dreaded in the school.

"Think--" said Sor Teresa. "Think before you say that."

"Well," argued Juanita, "if you did not urge me in words, you used every
means in your power to induce me to take the veil--to make it impossible
for me to do anything else."

"Think!" urged Sor Teresa. "Think again. Do not include me in such
generalities without thinking."

Juanita paused. She ran back in her mind over a hundred incidents of
school life, remembered, as such are, with photographic accuracy.

"Well," she admitted at length. "You did your best to make me hate it--at
all events."

"Ah!" said Sor Teresa, with a slow smile.

"Then you did not want me to go into religion--" Juanita came a step
nearer and peered into Sor Teresa's face. She might as well have sought
an answer in a face of stone.

"Answer me," she said impatiently.

"All are not suited for the religious life," answered the Sister Superior
after the manner of her teaching. "I have known many such, and I have
seen much sorrow arising from a mistaken sense of duty. I have heard of
lives wrecked by it--I have known of two."

Juanita who had moved away impatiently, now turned and looked at Sor
Teresa. The gloom of evening was gathering in the little bare room. The
stillness of the convent was oppressive.

"Were you suited to the religious life?" asked the girl suddenly.

But Sor Teresa made no answer.

Juanita sat suddenly down. Her movements were quick and impulsive still,
as they had been when she was a schoolgirl. When she had arrived at the
convent she had felt hungry and tired. The feelings came back to her with
renewed intensity now. She was sick at heart. The gray twilight within
these walls was like the gloom of a hopeless life.

"I wonder who the other was," she said, half to herself. For the world
was opening out before her like a great book hitherto closed. The lives
of men and women had gained depth and meaning in a flash of thought.

She rose and impulsively kissed Sor Teresa.

"I used to be afraid of you," she said, with a laugh which seemed to
surprise her, as if the voice that had spoken was not her own. Then she
sat down again. It was almost dark in the room now, and the window
glimmered a forlorn gray.

"I am so hungry and tired," said Juanita in rather a faint voice, "but I
am glad I came. I could not stay in Torre Garda another hour. Marcos
married me for my money. The money was wanted for political purposes.
They could not get it without me--so I was thrown in."

She dropped her two hands heavily on the table and looked up as if
expecting some exclamation of surprise or horror. But her hearer made no
sign.

"Did you know this?" she asked, in an altered voice after a pause. "Are
you in the plot, too, as well as Marcos and Uncle Ramon? Have you been
scheming all this time as well, that I should marry Marcos?"

"Since you ask me," said Sor Teresa, slowly and coldly, "I think you
would be happier married to Marcos than in religion. It is only my
opinion, of course, and you must decide for yourself. It is probably the
opinion of others, however, as well. There are plenty of girls who ..."

"Oh! are there?" cried Juanita, passionately. "Who--I should like to
know?"

"I am only speaking in generalities, my child."

Juanita looked at her suspiciously, her April eyes glittering with a new
light.

"I thought you meant Milagros. He once said that he thought her pretty,
and liked her hair. It is red, everybody knows that. Besides, we are
married."

She dropped her tired head upon her folded arms--a schoolgirl attitude
which returned naturally to her amid the old surroundings.

"I don't care what becomes of me," she said wearily. "I don't know what
to do. It is very hard that papa should be dead and Leon ... Leon such a
preposterous stupid. You know he is."

Sor Teresa did not deny this sisterly truth; but stood motionless,
waiting for Juanita's decision.

"I am so hungry and tired," she said at length. "I suppose I can have
something to eat ... if I pay for it."

"Yes; you can have something to eat."

"And I may be allowed to stay here to-night, at all events."

"No, you cannot do that," answered the Sister Superior.

Juanita looked up in surprise.

"Then what am I to do? Where am I to go?"

"Back to your husband," was the reply in the same gentle, inexorable
voice. "I will take you back to Marcos--that is all I will do for you. I
will take you myself."

Juanita laughed scornfully and shook her head. She had plenty of that
spirit which will fight to the end and overcome fatigue and hunger.

"You may be mistress here," she said. "But I do not think you can deny me
a lodging. You cannot turn me out into the street."

"Under exceptional circumstances I can do both."

"Ah!" muttered Juanita, incredulously.

"And those circumstances have arisen. There, you can satisfy yourself."

She laid before Juanita, on the bare table, a paper which it was not
possible to read in the semi-darkness. She turned to the mantelpiece,
where two tall candles added to the sacerdotal simplicity of the room.
While the sulphur match burnt blue, Juanita looked indifferently at the
printed paper.

"It is a siege notice," said Sor Teresa, seeing that her hearer refused
to read. "It is signed by General Pacheco, who arrived here with a large
army to-day. It is expected that Pampeluna may be besieged by to-morrow
evening. The investment may be a long one, which will mean starvation.
Every householder must make a return of those dwelling under his roof. He
must refuse domicile to any strangers; and I refuse to take you into this
house."

Juanita read the paper now by the light of the candles which Sor Teresa
set on the table. It was a curt, military document without explanation or
unnecessary mitigation of the truth. For Pampeluna had seen the like
before and understood this business thoroughly.

"You can think about it," said Sor Teresa, folding the paper and placing
it in her pocket. "I will send you something to eat and drink in this
room."

She closed the door, leaving Juanita to realise the grim fact that--shape
our lives how we will, with all foresight--every care--the history of the
world or of a nation will suddenly break into the story of the single
life and march over it with a giant stride.

Presently a lay-sister brought refreshments and set the tray on the table
without speaking. Juanita knew her well--and she, doubtless, knew
Juanita's story; for her pious face was drawn into lines indicative of
the deepest disapproval.

Juanita ate heartily enough, not noticing the cold simplicity of the
fare. She had finished before Sor Teresa returned and without thinking of
what she was doing, had rearranged the tray after the manner of the
refectory. She was standing by the window which she had opened. The
sounds of war came into the room with startling distinctness. The boom of
the distant guns disputing the advance of the Carlists; while nearer, the
bugles called the men to arms and the heavy tramp of feet came and went
in the Calle de la Dormitaleria.

"Well," asked Sor Teresa. "What have you decided to do?"

Juanita listened to the alarm of war for a moment before turning from the
window.

"It is not a false alarm?" she inquired. "The Carlists are really out?"

For she had fallen into the habit of the Northern Provinces, of speaking
of the insurrection as if it were a recurrent flood.

"They have been preparing all the winter," answered Sor Teresa.

"And Pampeluna is to be invested?"

"Yes."

"And Torre Garda?..."

"Torre Garda," answered the nun, "is to be taken this time. The Carlists
have decided to besiege it. It is at the mouth of the valley that the
fighting is taking place."

"Then I will go back to Torre Garda," said Juanita.

CHAPTER XXVI

AT THE FORD
"They will allow two nuns to pass anywhere," said Sor Teresa with her
chilling smile as she led the way to her own cell in the corridor
overhead. She provided Juanita with that dress which is a passport
through any quarter of a town, across any frontier; to any battlefield.
So Juanita took the veil at last--in order to return to Marcos.

Sor Teresa's words proved true enough at the city gates where the
sentinels recognised her and allowed her carriage to pass across the
drawbridge by a careless nod of acquiescence to the driver.

It was a clear dark night without a moon. The prevailing wind which
hurries down from the Pyrenees to the warmer plains of Spain stirred the
budding leaves of the trees that border the road below the town walls.

"I suppose," said Sor Teresa suddenly, "that Evasio Mon was at Torre
Garda to-day."

"Yes."

"And you left him there when you came away."

"Yes."

"We shall meet him on the road," said Sor Teresa with a note of anxiety
in her voice. Presently she stood up in the carriage which was an open
one on high wheels and spoke to the driver in a low voice into his ear.
He was a stout and respectable man with a good ecclesiastical clientèle
in the pious capital of Navarre. He had a confidential manner.

The distant firing had ceased now and a great stillness reigned over the
bare land. There are no trees here to harbour birds or to rustle in the
wind. The man, nursing his horses for the long journey, drove at an easy
pace. Juanita, usually voluble enough, seemed to have nothing to say to
Sor Teresa. The driver could possibly overhear the conversation of his
passengers. For this, or for another reason, Sor Teresa was silent.

As they approached the hills, they found themselves in a more broken
country. They climbed and descended with a rather irritating regularity.
The spurs of the Pyrenees keep their form right down to the plains and
the road to Torre Garda passes over them. Juanita leant sideways out of
the carnage and stared upwards into the pine trees.

"Do you see anything?" asked Sor Teresa.

"No--I can see nothing."

"There is a chapel up there, on the slope."

"Our Lady of the Shadows," answered Juanita and lapsed into silence
again. She knew now why the name had struck her with such foreboding,
when she had learnt it from the lips of the laughing young captain of
infantry.

It told of calamity--the greatest that can happen to a woman--to be
married without love.

The driver turned in his seat and tried to overhear. He seemed uneasy and
looked about him with quick turns of the head. At last, when his horses
were mounting a hill, he turned round.

"Did these sainted ladies hear anything?" he asked.

"No," answered Sor Teresa. "Why do you ask?"

"There has been a man on horseback on the road behind us," he answered
with assumed carelessness, "all the way from Pampeluna. He has now taken
a short cut and is in front on the road above us; I can hear him; that is
all."

And he gave a little cry to his horses; the signal for them to trot. They
were approaching the mouth of the Valley of the Wolf, and could hear the
sound of its wild waters in the darkness below them. The valley opens out
like a fan with either slope rising at an easy angle to the pine woods.
The road is a cornice cut on the western bank upon which side it runs for
ten miles until the bridge below the village of Torre Garda leads it
across the river to the sunny slope where the village crouches below the
ancient castle from which the name is taken.

The horses were going at a walking pace now, and the driver to show,
perhaps, his nonchalance and fearlessness was humming a song beneath his
breath, when suddenly the hillside burst into flame and a deafening roar
of musketry stunned both horses and driver. Juanita happened to be
looking up at the hillside and she saw the fire run along like a snake of
flame in the grass. In a moment the carriage had swung round and the
horses were going at a gallop down the hill again. The driver stood up.
He had a rein in either hand and he hauled the horses round each
successive corner with consummate skill. All the while he used language
which would have huddled Cousin Peligros shrieking in the bottom of the
carriage.

Juanita and Sor Teresa stood up and looked back. By the light of the
firing they saw a man lying low on his horse's neck galloping headlong
through the zone of death after them.

"Did you hear the bullets?" said Juanita breathlessly. "They were like
the wind through the telegraph-wires. Oh, I should like to be a man; I
should like to be a soldier!"

And she gave a low laugh of thrilling excitement.

The driver was now pulling up his horses. He too laughed aloud.

"It is the troops," he cried. "They thought we were the Carlists. But,
who is this, Señoras? It is that man again."

He leant back and hastily twisted one of the carriage-lamps round in its
socket so as to show a light behind him towards the newcomer.

As the rider pulled up he came within the rays of the lamp which was a
powerful one; and at the sight of him Juanita gave a sharp cry which
neither she nor any that heard it forgot to the end of their lives.

"It is Marcos," she cried, clutching Sor Teresa's arm. "And he came
through that--he came through that!"

"No one hurt?" asked Marcos' deep voice.

"No one hurt, Señor," answered the driver who had recognised him.

"And the horses?"

"The horses are safe. A malediction upon them; they nearly had us over
the cliff. Those are the troops. They took us for Carlists."

"No," said Marcos. "They are the Carlists. The troops have been driven
farther up the valley where they are entrenched. They have sent to
Pampeluna for help. This is a Carlist trap to catch the reinforcements as
they approach. They thought your carriage was a gun."

The driver scratched his head and made known his views as to the
ancestory of the Carlists.

"There is no getting into the valley to-night," said Marcos to Sor Teresa
and Juanita. "You must return to Pampeluna."

"And what will you do?" asked Juanita in a hard voice.

"I will go on to Torre Garda on foot," answered Marcos speaking in French
so that the driver should not hear and understand. "There is a way over
the mountains which is known to two or three only."

"Uncle Ramon is at Torre Garda?" asked Juanita in the same curt, quick
way.

"Yes."

"Then I will go with you," she said with her hand already on the door.

"It is sixteen miles," said Marcos, "over the high mountains. The last
part can only be done by daylight. I shall be in the mountains all
night."

Juanita had opened the door. She stood on the step looking up at him as
he sat on the tall black horse,

"If you will take me," she said in French, "I will come with you."

Sor Teresa was silent still. She had not spoken since Marcos had pulled
up his sweating horse in the lamplight. What a simple world this would be
if more of its women knew when to hold their tongues!

Marcos, fresh from a bed of sickness was not fit to undertake this
journey. He must already be tired out; for she knew that it was Marcos
who had followed their carriage from Pampeluna. She guessed that finding
no troops where he expected to find them he had ridden ahead to discover
the cause of it and had passed unheard through the Carlist ambush and
back again through the zone of fire. That Juanita could accomplish the
journey on foot to Torre Garda seemed doubtful. The country was unsafe;
the snows had hardly melted. It was madness for a wounded man and a girl
to attempt to reach Torre Garda through a pass held by the enemy. But Sor
Teresa said nothing.

Marcos sat motionless in the saddle. His face was above the radius of the
reversed carriage-lamp, while Juanita standing on the dusty road in her
nun's dress looking up at him, was close to the glaring light. It is to
be presumed that he was watching her descend from the carriage and then
turn to shut the door on Sor Teresa. By his silence, Marcos seemed to
consent to this arrangement.

He came forward into the light now. In his hand he held a paper which he
was unfolding. Juanita recognised the letter she had written to him in
the drawing-room at Torre Garda. He tore the blank sheet off and folding
the letter closely, replaced it in his pocket. Then he laid the blank
sheet on the dusty splash-board of the carriage and wrote a few words in
pencil.

"You must get back to Pampeluna," he said to the driver in that tone of
command which is the only survival of feudal days now left in Europe--and
even the modern Spaniards are losing it--"at any cost--you understand. If
you meet the reinforcements on the road give this note to the commanding
officer. Take no denial; give it into his own hand. If you meet no troops
go straight to the house of the commandant at Pampeluna and give the
letter to him. You will see that it is done," he said in a lower voice,
turning to Sor Teresa.

The man protested that nothing short of death would prevent his carrying
out the instructions.

"It will be worth your while," said Marcos. "It will be remembered
afterwards."

He paused deep in thought. There were a hundred things to be considered
at that moment; quickly and carefully. For he was going into the Valley
of the Wolf, cut off from all the world by two armies watching each other
with a deadly hatred.

The quiet voice of Sor Teresa broke the silence, softly taking its place
in his thoughts. It seemed that the Sarrion brain had the power--the
secret of so much success in this world--of thrusting forth a sure and
steady hand to grasp the heart of a question and tear it from the tangle
of side-issues among which the majority of men and women are condemned to
flounder.

"Where is Evasio Mon?" she asked.

Marcos answered with a low, contented laugh.

"He is trapped in the valley," he said in French. "I have seen to that."

The firing had ceased as suddenly as it had commenced, and a silence only
broken by the voice of the river, now hung over the valley.

"Are you ready?" Sor Teresa asked her driver.

"Yes, Excellency."

"Then go."

She may have nodded a farewell to Marcos and Juanita. But that they could
not see in the blackness of the night. She certainly gave them no spoken
salutation. The carriage moved away at a sharp trot, leaving Marcos and
Juanita alone.

"We can ride some distance and must ford the river higher up," said
Marcos at once. He did not seem to want any explanation. The excitement
of the moment seemed to have wiped out the events of the last few months
like writing off a slate. Juanita was young again, ready to throw herself
headlong into an adventure in the mountains with Marcos such as they had
had together many times during the holidays. But this was better than the
dangers of mere snow and ice. For Juanita had tasted that highest of
emotions, the excitement of battle. She had heard that which some men
having once heard cannot live without, the siren song of a bullet.

"Are we going nearer to the Carlists?" she asked hurriedly. There was
fighting blood in her veins, and the tones of her voice told clearly
enough that it was astir at this moment.

"Yes," answered Marcos. "We must pass underneath them; for the ford is
there. We must be quite noiseless. We must not even whisper."

He edged his horse towards one of the rough stones laid on the outer edge
of the road to mark its limit at night.

"I can only give you one hand," he said. "Can you get up from this
stone?"

"Behind you?" asked Juanita; "as we used to ride when I was--little?"

For Marcos had, like most Spaniards, grown from boyhood to manhood in the
saddle, and Juanita had no fear of horses. She clambered to the broad
back of the Moor and settled herself there, sitting pillion fashion and
holding herself in position with both hands round Marcos.

"If he trots, I fall off," she said, with an eager laugh.

They soon quitted the road and began to descend the steep slope towards
the river by a narrow path only made visible by the open space in the
high brushwood. It was the way down to a ford leading to a cottage by
courtesy called a farm, though the cultivated land was scarcely an acre
in extent, reclaimed from the river-bed.

The ground was soft and mossy and the roar of the river covered the tread
of the careful horse. In a few minutes they reached the water's edge, and
after a moment's hesitation the Moor stepped boldly in. On the other bank
Marcos whispered to Juanita to drop to the ground.

"The cottage is here," he said. "I shall leave the horse in their shed."

He descended from the saddle and they stood for a moment side by side.

"Let us wait a few moments, the moon is rising," said Marcos. "Perhaps
the Carlists have been here."

As he spoke the sky grew lighter. In a minute or two a waning moon looked
out over the sharp outline of hill and flooded the valley with a reddish
light.

"It is all right," he said; nothing is disturbed here. They are asleep in
the cottage; the noise of the river must have drowned the firing. They
are friends of mine; they will give us some food for to-morrow morning
and another dress for you. You cannot go in that."

"Oh!" laughed Juanita, "I have taken the veil. It is done now and cannot
be undone."

She raised her hands to the wings of her spreading cap as if to defend it
against all comers. And Marcos, turning, suddenly threw his uninjured arm
round her, imprisoning her struggling arms. He held her thus a prisoner
while with his injured hand he found the strings of the cap. In a moment
the starched linen fluttered out, fell into the river, and was carried
swirling away.

Juanita was still laughing, but Marcos did not answer to her gaiety. She
recollected at that instant having once threatened to dress as a nun in
order to alarm Marcos, and Sarrion's grave remark that it would of a
certainty frighten him.

They were silent for a moment. Then Juanita spoke with a sort of forced
lightness.

"You may have only one arm," she said, "but it is an astonishingly strong
one!"

And she looked at him surreptitiously beneath her lashes as she stood
with her hands on her hair.

CHAPTER XXVII

IN THE CLOUDS
Marcos tied his horse to a tree and led the way towards the cottage. It
seemed to be innocent of bars and bolts. The ford, known to so few, and
the evil name of the Wolf, served instead. The door opened at a push, and
Marcos went in. A wood-fire smouldered on an open hearth, while the acrid
smoke half-filled the room, blackened by the fumes of peat and charcoal.

Marcos stood on the threshold and called the owner by name. There was a
shuffling sound in an inner room and the scraping of a match. A minute
later a door was opened and an old woman stood in the aperture, fully
dressed and carrying a lamp above her head.

"Ah!" she said. "It is you. I thought it was the voice of a friend. And
you have your pretty wife there. What are you doing abroad at this hour
... the Carlists?"

"Yes," answered Marcos, rather quickly, "the Carlists. We cannot pass by
the road, so have sent the carriage back and are going across the
mountains."

The woman held up her hands and shook them from side to side in a gesture
of horror.

"Ah! but there!" she cried, "I know what you are. There is no turning
your back on your road. If you say you will go--you will go though it
rain rocks. But this child--ah, dear, dear! You do not know what you have
married--with your bright eyes. Sit down, my child. I will get you what I
can. Some coffee. I am alone in the house. All my men have gone to the
high valley, now that the snow is gone, to collect wood and to see what
the winter has done for our hut up in the mountain."

Marcos thanked her, and explained that they wanted nothing but a roof
under which to leave his horse.

"We are going up to the higher valley to-night," he said, "where we shall
find your husband and sons. And at daylight we must hurry on to Torre
Garda. But I want to borrow a dress and handkerchief belonging to one of
your daughters. See, the Señora cannot walk in that one, which is too
fine and too long."

"Oh, but my daughters ..." exclaimed the old woman, with deprecating
hands.

"They are very pretty girls," answered Marcos, with a laugh. "All the
valley knows that."

"They are not bad," admitted the mother, "but it is a flower compared to
a cabbage. Still, we can hide the flower in the cabbage leaves if you
like."

And she laughed heartily at her own conceit.

"Then see to it while I put my horse away," said Marcos. He quitted the
hut and overheard the woman pointing out to Juanita that she had lost her
mantilla coming through the trees in the dark. While he attended to his
horse he could hear their laughter and gay conversation over the change
of clothes; for Juanita understood these people as well as he did, and
had grown through childhood to the age of thought in their midst. The
peasant was still pressing a simple hospitality upon Juanita when Marcos
returned to the cottage and found her ready for the journey.

"I was telling the Señora," explained the woman volubly, "that she must
not so much as look inside the cottage in the mountains. I have not been
there for six months and the men--you know what they are. They are no
better than dogs I tell them. There is plenty of clean hay and dry
bracken in the sheds up there and you can well make a soft bed for her to
get some sleep for a few hours. And here I have unfolded a new blanket
for the lady. See, it is white as I bought it. She can use it. It has
never been worn--by us others," she added with perfect simplicity.

Marcos took the blanket while Juanita explained that having slept soundly
every night of her life without exception, she could well now accommodate
herself with a rest of two hours in the hay. The woman pressed upon them
some of her small store of coffee and some new bread.

"He can well prepare your breakfast for you," she said, confidentially to
Juanita. "He is like one of us. All the valley will tell you that. A
great gentleman who can yet cook his own breakfast--as the good God meant
them to be."

They set forth at once in the yellow light of the waning moon, Marcos
leading the way up a pathway hardly discernible amid the rocks and
undergrowth. Once or twice he turned to help Juanita over a hard or a
dangerous place. But they did not talk, as conversation was not only
difficult but inexpedient. They had climbed for two hours, slowly and
steadily, when the barking of a dog on the mountainside above them
notified them that they were nearing their destination.

"Who is it?" asked a voice presently.

"Marcos de Sarrion," replied Marcos. "Strike no lights."

"We have no candles up here," answered the man with a laugh. He only
spoke Basque and it was in this language that Marcos gave a brief
explanation. Juanita sat on a rock. She was tired out. There were three
men--short, thick-set and silent, a father and two sons. They stood in
front of Marcos and spoke in monosyllables after the manner of old
friends. Under his directions they brought a heap of dried bracken and
hay. In a shed, little more than a roof and four uprights, they made a
rough couch for Juanita which they hedged round with heaps of bracken to
protect her from the wind.

"You will see the stars," said the old man shaking out the blanket which
Marcos had carried up from the cottage at the ford. "It is good to see
the stars when you awake in the night. One remembers that the saints are
watching."

In a few minutes Juanita was sleeping, like a child, curled up beneath
her blanket, and heard through her dreams the low voices of Marcos and
the peasants talking hurriedly in the half-ruined cottage. For Marcos and
these three were the only men who knew the way over the mountains to
Torre Garda.

The dawn was just breaking when Marcos awoke Juanita.

"Oh," she said plaintively. "I have only been asleep ten minutes."

"You have slept three hours," replied Marcos in that hushed voice in
which it seems natural to speak before the dawn. "I am making
coffee--come when you are ready."

Juanita found a pail of water and a piece of last year's yellow soap
which had been carefully scraped clean with a knife. A clean towel had
also been provided. Juanita noted the manly simplicity of these
attentions with a little tender and wise smile.

"I know what it is that makes men gipsies," she said, when she joined
Marcos who was attending to a fire of sticks on the ground at the cottage
door. "I shall always have a kindly feeling for them now. They get
something straight from heaven which is never known to people who sleep
in stuffy houses and get up to wash in warm water."

She gave a little shiver at the recollection of her ablutions, and
laughed a clear, low laugh, as fresh as the morning itself.

"Where are the men?" she asked.

"One has gone to Pampeluna, one has taken a note to the officer
commanding the reinforcements sent for by Zeneta. The third has gone down
to fetch his mother up here to bake bread all day. There will be a little
army here to-night."

Juanita stood watching Marcos who seemed entirely absorbed in blowing up
the fire with a pair of dilapidated bellows.

"I suppose," she said lightly, "that it was of these things that you were
thinking when you were so silent as we climbed up here last night."

"I suppose so," answered Marcos.

Juanita looked at him with a little frown as if she did not quite believe
him. The day had now come and a pink light suffused the topmost peaks. A
faint warmth spread itself like a caress across the valley and turned the
cold air into a pearly mist.

"Of what are you thinking?" asked Marcos suddenly; for Juanita had stood
motionless, watching him.

"I was thinking what a comfort it is that you are not an indoor man," she
replied with a careless laugh.

The peasants had brought their cows to the high pastures. So there was
plenty of milk in the cottage which was little more than a dairy; for it
had no furniture beyond a few straw mattresses thrown on the floor in one
corner. Marcos served breakfast.

"Pedro particularly told me to see that you had the cup which has a
handle," he said, pouring the coffee from a battered coffee-pot. During
their simple breakfast they were silent. There was a subtle constraint.
Juanita who had a quick and direct mind, decided that the moment had come
for that explanation for which Marcos did not ask. An explanation does
not improve by keeping. They were alone here--alone in the world it
seemed--for the cows had strayed away. The dogs had gone to the valley
with their masters. She and Marcos had always known each other. She knew
his every thought; she was not afraid of him; she never had been. Why
should she be now?

"Marcos," she said.

"Yes."

"I want you to give me the letter I wrote to you at Torre Garda."

He felt in his pocket and handed her the first paper he found without
particularly looking at it. Juanita unfolded it. It was the note, all
crumpled, which she had thrust through the wall of the convent school at
Saragossa. She had forgotten it, but Marcos had kept it all this time.

"That is the wrong one," she said gravely, and handed it back to Marcos,
who took it with a little jerk of the head as of annoyance at his own
stupidity. He was usually very accurate in details. He gave her in
exchange the right paper, which had been torn in two. The other half is
in the military despatch office in Madrid to-day. Juanita had arranged in
her own mind what to say. She was quite mistress of the situation, and
was ready to move serenely and surely in her own sphere, taking the lead
in such subtle matters with the capability and mastery which
characterised Marcos' lead in affairs of action. But Marcos' mistake
seemed to have put out her prearranged scheme.

She slowly tore the letter into pieces and threw it on the fire.

"Do you know why I came back?" she asked, which question can hardly have
formed part of the plan of action.

"No."

"Because you never pretended that you cared. If you had pretended that
you cared for me, I should never have forgiven you."

Marcos did not answer. He looked up slowly, expecting perhaps to find her
looking elsewhere. But her eyes met his and she shrank back with an
involuntary movement that seemed to be of fear. Her face flushed all over
and then the colour faded from it, leaving her white and motionless as
she sat staring into the flickering wood-fire.

Presently she rose and walked to the edge of the plateau upon which the
hut was built. She stood there looking across to the mountains.

Marcos busied himself with the simple possessions of his host, setting
them in order where he had found them and treading out the smouldering
embers of the fire. Juanita turned and watched him over her shoulder with
a mystic persistency. Beneath her lashes lurked a smile--triumphant and
tender.

CHAPTER XXVIII

LE GANT DE VELOURS
They accomplished the rest of the journey without accident. The old
spirit of adventure which had led them to these mountains while they were
yet children seemed to awaken again, and they were as comrades. But
Juanita was absent-minded. She was not climbing skilfully. At one place
far above trees or other vegetation she made a false step and sent a
great rock rolling down the slope.

"You must be careful," said Marcos, almost sharply. "You are not thinking
what you are doing."

And Juanita suffered the reproof with an unwonted meekness. She was more
careful while they passed over a dangerous slope where the snow had
softened in the morning sun, and came to the topmost valley--an oval
basin of rocks and snow with no visible outlet. Immediately below them,
at the foot of a slope, which looked quite feasible, lay huddled the body
of a man.

"It is a Carlist," explained Marcos. "We heard some time ago that they
had been trying to find another way over to Torre Garda. That valley is a
trap. That is not the way to Torre Garda at all; and that slope is solid
ice. See, his knife lies beside him. He tried to cut steps before he
died. This is our way."

And he led Juanita rather hastily away. At nine o'clock they passed the
last shoulder and stood above Torre Garda, and the valley of the Wolf
lying in the sunlight below them. The road down the valley lay like a
yellow ribbon stretched across the broad breast of Nature.

Half an hour later they reached the pine woods, and heard Perro barking
on the terrace. The dog soon came panting to meet them, and not far
behind him Sarrion, whose face betrayed no surprise at perceiving
Juanita.

"You would have been safer at Pampeluna," he said with a keen glance into
her face.

"I am quite safe enough here, thank you," she answered, meeting his eyes
with a steady smile.

He asked Marcos whether he had felt his wounded shoulder or suffered from
so much exertion. And Juanita answered more fully than Marcos, giving
details which she had certainly not learnt from himself. A man having
once been nursed in sickness by a woman parts with some portion of his
personal liberty which she never relinquishes.

"It is the result of good nursing," said Sarrion, slipping his hand
inside Juanita's arm and walking by her side.

"It is the result of his great strength," she answered, with a glance
towards Marcos, which he did not perceive, for he was looking straight in
front of him.

"Uncle Ramon," said Juanita, an hour later when they were sitting on the
terrace together. She turned towards him suddenly with her shrewd little
smile. "Uncle Ramon--do you ever play Pelota?"

"Every Basque plays Pelota," he replied.

Juanita nodded and lapsed into reflective silence. She seemed to be
arranging something in her mind. Towards Sarrion, as towards Marcos, she
assumed at times an attitude of protection, and almost of patronage, as
if she knew much that was hidden from them and had access to some chamber
of life of which the door was closed to all men.

"Does it ever strike you," she said at length, "that in a game of
Pelota--supposing the ball to be endowed with a ... well a certain lower
form of intelligence, the intelligence of a mere woman, for instance--it
would be rather natural for it to wonder what on earth the game was
about? It might even think that it had a certain right to know what was
happening to it."

"Yes," admitted Sarrion, who having a quick and eager mind, understood
that Juanita was preparing to speak plainly. And at such times women
always speak more plainly than men. He lighted a cigarette, threw away
the match with a little gesture which seemed to indicate that he was
ready for her--would meet her on her own ground.

"Why did Evasio Mon want me to go into religion?" she asked bluntly.

"My child--you have three million pesetas."

"And if I had gone into religion--and I nearly did--the Church would have
had them?"

"Pardon me," said Sarrion. "The Jesuits--not the Church. It is not the
same thing--though the world does not yet understand that. The Jesuits
would have had the money and they would have spent it in throwing Spain
into another civil war which would have been a worse war than we have
seen. The Church--our Church--has enemies. It has Bismarck, and the
English; but it has no worse enemy than the Jesuits. For they play their
own game."

"At Pelota! and you and Marcos?"

"We were on the other side," said Sarrion, with a shrug of the shoulders.

"And I have been the ball."

Sarrion glanced at her sideways. This was the moment that Marcos had
always anticipated. Sarrion wondered why he should have to meet it and
not Marcos. Juanita sat motionless with steady eyes fixed on the distant
mountains. He looked at her lips and saw there a faint smile not devoid
of pity--as if she knew something of which he was ignorant. He pulled
himself together; for he was a bold man who faced his fences with a
smile.

"Well," he said, "... since we have won."

"Have you won?"

Sarrion glanced at her again. Why did she not speak plainly, he was
wondering. In the subtler matters of life, women have a clearer
comprehension and a plainer speech than men. When they are
tongue-tied--the reason is a strong one.

"At all events Señor Mon does not know when he is beaten," said Juanita,
and the silence that followed was broken by the distant sound of firing.
They were fighting at the mouth of the valley.

"That is true," admitted Sarrion.

"They say he is trapped in the valley--as we are."

"So I believe."

"Will he come to Torre Garda?"

"As likely as not," answered Sarrion. "He has never lacked audacity."

"If he comes I should like to speak to him," said Juanita.

Sarrion wondered whether she intended to make Evasio Mon understand that
he was beaten. It was Mon himself who had said that the woman always
holds the casting vote.

"At all events," said Juanita, who seemed to have returned in her
thoughts to the question of winning or losing. "At all events, you played
a bold game."

"That is why we won," said Sarrion, stoutly.

"And you did not heed the risks."

"What risks?"

Juanita turned and looked at him with a little laugh of scorn.

"Oh, you do not understand. Neither does Marcos. I suppose men don't. You
might have ruined several lives."

"So might Evasio Mon," returned Sarrion sharply. And Juanita rather drew
back as a fencer may flinch who has been touched.

Sarrion leant back in his chair and threw away the cigarette which he had
not smoked. Juanita had chosen her own ground and he had met her on it.
He had answered the question which she was too proud to ask.

And as he had anticipated, Evasio Mon came to Torre Garda. It was almost
dusk when he arrived. Whether he knew that Marcos was not in his room,
remained an open question. He did not ask after him. He was brought by
the servant to the terrace where he found Cousin Peligros and Juanita.
Sarrion was in his study and came out when Mon passed the open window.

"So we are all besieged," said the visitor, with his tolerant smile as he
took a chair offered to him in the grand manner by Cousin Peligros, who
belonged to the school of etiquette that holds it wrong for any lady to
be natural in the presence of men other than of her own family.

Cousin Peligros smiled in rather a pinched way, and with a gesture of her
outspread hands morally wiped the besiegers out. No female Sarrion, she
seemed to imply, need ever fear inconvenience from a person in uniform.

"You and I, Señorita," said Mon, with his bland and easy sympathy of
manner, "have no business here. We are persons of peace."

Cousin Peligros made a condescending and yet decisive gesture, patting
the empty air.

"I have my charge. I shall fulfil it," she said--determined, and not
without a suggestion of coyness withal.

Juanita was lying in wait for a glance from Sarrion and when she received
it she made a little movement of the eyelids, telling him to take Cousin
Peligros away.

"You will stay the night," said Sarrion to Evasio Mon.

"No, my friend. Thank you very much. I cherish a hope of getting through
the lines to-night to Pampeluna. I came indeed to offer my poor services
as escort to these ladies who will surely be safer at Pampeluna."

"Then you think that they will besiege Torre Garda," asked Sarrion,
innocently. "One never knows, my friend--one never knows. It seems to me
that the firing is nearer this afternoon."

Sarrion laughed.

"You are always hearing guns."

Mon turned and looked at him and there was a suggestion of melancholy in
his smile.

"Ah! Ramon," he said. "You and I have heard them all our lives."

And there was perhaps a second meaning in his words, known only to
Sarrion, whose face softened for an instant.

"Let us have some coffee," he said, turning to Cousin Peligros. "Will you
see to it, Peligros--in the library?"

So Peligros walked across the broad terrace with the mincing steps taught
in the thirties, leaving Mon hatless with a bowed head according to the
etiquette of those leisurely days. He was all things, to all men.

"By the way ..." said Sarrion, and followed her without completing his
sentence.

So Juanita and Evasio Mon were left alone on the terrace. Juanita was
sitting rather upright in a garden chair. The only seat near to her was
the easy chair just vacated by Cousin Peligros. Mon looked at it. He
glanced at Juanita and then drew it forward. She turned, and with a smile
and gesture invited him to be seated. A watchful look came into Evasio
Mon's quick eyes behind the glasses that reflected the last rays of the
setting sun. For the young and the guilty, silence has a special terror.
Mon had dealt with the young and the guilty all his life. He sat down
without speaking. He was waiting for Juanita. Juanita moved her toe
within her neat black slipper, looking at it critically. She was waiting
for Evasio Mon. He paused as a duellist may pause with his best weapons
laid out on the table before him, wondering which one to select. Perhaps
he suspected that Juanita held the keenest; that deadly plain-speaking.

His subtle training had taught him to sink self so completely that it was
easy to him to insinuate his mind into the thoughts of another; to
understand them, almost to sympathise with them. But Juanita puzzled him.
There is no face so baffling as that which a woman shows the world when
she is hiding her heart.

"I spoke as a friend," said Mon, "when I recommended you to allow me to
escort you to Pampeluna."

"I know that you always speak as a friend," answered Juanita quietly,
"... of mine. Not of Marcos, perhaps."

"Ah, but your friends are Marcos'," said Mon, with a suggestion of
raillery in his voice.

"And his enemies are mine," she retorted, looking straight in front of
her.

"Of course--is it not written in the marriage service?" Mon laughingly
turned in his chair and cast a glance up at the windows as he spoke. They
were beyond earshot of the house. "But why should I be an enemy of Marcos
de Sarrion?"

Then Juanita unmasked her guns.

"Because he outwitted you and married me," she answered.

"For your money--"

"Yes, for my money. He was quite honest about it, I assure you. He told
me that it was a matter of business--of politics. That was the word he
used."

"He told you that?" asked Mon in real surprise.

Juanita nodded her head. She was looking at her own slipper again and the
moving foot within it. There was a mystic little smile at the corner of
her lips which tilted upwards there, as humorous and tender lips nearly
always do. It suggested that she knew something which even Evasio Mon,
the all-wise, did not know.

"And you believed him?" inquired Mon, dimly groping at the meaning of the
smile.

"He told me that it was the only way of escaping you ... and the rest of
them ... and Religion," answered Juanita--without answering the question.

"And you believed him?" repeated Mon, which was a mistake; for she turned
on him at once and answered,

"Yes."

Mon shrugged his shoulders with the tolerant air of one who has met
defeat time after time; who expected naught else perhaps.

"Then there is nothing more to be said," he observed carelessly. "You
elect to remain at Torre Garda. I bow to your decision, my child. I have
warned you."

"Against Marcos?"

Mon shrugged his shoulders a second time.

"And in reply to your warning," said Juanita slowly. "I will tell you
that Marcos has never done or said anything unworthy of a Spanish
gentleman--and there is no better gentleman in the world."

Which statement all men will assuredly be ready to admit.

Mon turned and looked at her with an odd smile.

"Ah!" he said. "You have fallen in love with Marcos."

Juanita changed colour and her eyes suddenly lighted with anger.

"I am not afraid of anything you may say or do," she said. "I have
Marcos. Marcos has always outwitted you when you have come in contact
with him. Marcos is cleverer than you. He is stronger."

She paused. Mon was slowly drawing his gloves through his hands which
were white and smooth.

"That is the difference between you," she continued. "You wear gloves.
Marcos takes hold of life with his bare hand. You may be more cunning,
but Marcos outwits you. The mind seeks but the heart finds. Your mind may
be subtle--but Marcos has a better heart."

Mon had risen. He stood with his face half turned away from her so that
she could only see his profile. And for a moment she was sorry for him;
that one moment which always mars an earthly victory.

He turned away from her and walked slowly towards the library window
which stood open and gave passage to the sound of moving cups and
saucers. We all carry with us through life the remembrance of certain
words probably forgotten by the speaker. A few bear the keener, sharper
memory of words unspoken. Juanita never forgot the silence of Evasio Mon
as he walked away from her.

A moment later she heard him laughing and talking in the library.

He had come on horseback and Sarrion accompanied him to the stables on
his departure. They were both young for their years. The Spaniards of the
north are thin and lithe and long-lived. Sarrion offered his hand for
Mon's knee, who with this aid sprang into the saddle.

He turned and looked towards the terrace.

"Juanita," he said, and paused. "She is no longer a child. One hopes that
she may have a happy life ... seeing that so many do not."

Sarrion made no answer.

"We are not weaklings," continued Mon lightly. "You, and Marcos and I. We
may sweat and toil as we will--but believe me, there is more power in
Juanita's little finger. It is the casting vote--amigo--the casting
vote."

He waved a salutation as he rode away.

CHAPTER XXIX

LA MAIN DE FER
Juanita was very early astir the next morning. The house was peculiarly
quiet, but she knew that Marcos, if he had been abroad, had now returned;
for Perro was lying on the terrace in the sunlight watching the library
window.

Juanita went to that room and there found Marcos writing letters. A map
of the Valley of the Wolf lay open on the table beside him.

"You are always writing letters," she said. "You began writing them on
the splash-board of the carriage at the mouth of the valley and you have
been doing it ever since."

"They are making use of my knowledge of the valley," he replied. He
continued his task after a very quick glance up at her. Juanita had found
out that he rarely looked at her.

"I am not at all tired after our adventure," she said. "I made up last
night for the want of sleep. Do I look tired?"

"Not at all," answered Marcos, glancing no higher than her waist.

"But I had a dream," she said. "It was so vivid that I am not sure now
that it was a dream. I am not sure that I did not in reality get out of
bed quite early in the morning, before daylight, when the moon was just
touching the mountains, and look out of my window. And the terrace,
Marcos, was covered with soldiers; rows and rows of them, like shadows.
And at the end, beneath my window, stood a group of men. Some were
officers; one looked like General Pacheco, fat with a chuckling laugh;
another seemed to be Captain Zeneta--the friend who stood by us in the
chapel of Our Lady of the Shadows--who was saying his prayers, you
remember. Most young men are too conceited to say their prayers nowadays.
And there were two civilians, in riding-boots all dusty, who looked
singularly like you and Uncle Ramon. It was an odd dream, Marcos--was it
not?"

"Yes," answered he with a laugh. "Do not tell it to the wrong people as
Joseph did."

"No, your reverence," she said. She stood looking at him with grave eyes.

"Is there going to be a battle?" she asked, curtly.

"Yes."

"Where?"

He pointed down into the valley with his pen.

"Just above the bridge if it all comes off as they have planned."

She went out on to the terrace and looked down into the valley, which was
peaceful enough in the morning light. The thin smoke of the pine
wood-fires rose from the chimneys in columns of brilliant blue. The sheep
on the slopes across the valley were calling to their lambs. Then Juanita
returned to the library window and stood on the threshold, with brooding
eyes and a bright patch of colour in her cheeks.

"Will you do me a favour?" she asked.

"Of course."

He lifted his pen from the paper, but did not look up.

"If there is a battle--if there is any fighting, will you take great care
of yourself? It would be so terrible if anything happened to you ... for
Uncle Ramon I mean."

"Yes," answered Marcos, gravely. "I understand. I promise to take care."

Juanita still lingered at the window.

"And you always keep your promises, don't you? To the letter?"

"Why shouldn't I?"

"No, of course not. It is characteristic of you, that is all. Your
promise is a sort of rock that nothing can move. Women, you know, make a
promise and then ask to be let off; you would not do that?"

"No," answered Marcos, quite simply.

In Navarre the hours of meals are much the same as those that rule in
England to-day. At one o'clock luncheon both Marcos and Sarrion were at
home. The valley seemed quiet enough. The soldiers of Juanita's dream
seemed to have vanished like the shadows to which she compared them.

"I am sure," said Cousin Peligros, while they were still at the table,
"that the sound of firing approaches. I have a very delicate hearing. All
my senses are very highly developed. The sound of the firing is nearer,
Marcos."

"Zeneta is retreating slowly before the enemy, with his small force,"
explained Marcos.

"But why is he doing that? He must surely know that there are ladies at
Torre Garda."

"Ladies are not articles of war," said Juanita with a frivolous disregard
of Cousin Peligros' reproving face. "And this is war."

As she spoke Marcos rose and quitted the room after glancing at his
watch. Juanita followed him.

"Marcos," she said, in the hall, having closed the dining-room door
behind her. "Will you tell me what time it will begin?"

"Zeneta is timed to retreat across the bridge at three o'clock. The enemy
will, it is hoped, follow him."

"And where will you be?"

"I shall be with Pacheco and his staff on the hill behind Pedro's mill.
You will see a little flag wherever Pacheco is."

Cousin Peligros' delicate hearing had not been deceived. The firing was
now close at hand. The valley takes a turn to the left below the ridge
and upon the hillside above this corner the white irregular line of smoke
now became visible.

In a few minutes the dark mass of Zeneta's men appeared on the road at
the corner. He was before his time. The men were running. They raised the
dust like a troop of sheep and moved in a halo of it. Every hundred yards
they stopped and fired a volley. They were acting with perfect regularity
and from a distance looked like toy soldiers. They were retreating in
good order and the sound of their volleys came at regular intervals. On
the bridge they halted. They were going to make a stand here, as would
seem natural. Had they had artillery they could have effectually held
this strong and narrow place.

It now became apparent that they were a woefully small detachment. They
could not spare men to take up positions on the rocky hillside behind
them.

There was a pause. The Carlists were waiting for their skirmishers to
come in from heights above the road.

Sarrion and Juanita stood at the edge of the terrace. Sarrion was
watching with a quick and comprehensive glance.

"Is General Pacheco a good general?" asked Juanita.

"Excellent."

Sarrion did not comment further on this successful soldier.

"They played me false," the General had told him indignantly a few hours
earlier. "They promised me a good sum--yes a sufficient sum. But when the
time came the money was not forthcoming. An awkward position; but I found
a way out of it."

"By being loyal," suggested Sarrion with a short laugh and there the
conversation ceased.

Juanita looked across the valley towards Pedro's mill. There was no flag
there. All the valley was peaceful enough, giving in the brilliant
sunshine no glint of sword or bayonet.

On the bridge, the little knot of men awaited the advent of the Carlists