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.