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 Senor 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, Senorita," 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 Senorita 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—Senora 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 clientele 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, Senoras? 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, Senor," 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 Senora 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 Senora," 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 Senor 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, Senorita," 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."