She did not know that this was one of Marcos’ friends—­that in the summer this colchonero took the road with his packet of cigarettes and two sticks and wandered from village to village in the mountains beating the mattresses of the people and seeing the wondrous works of God as these are only seen by such as live all day and sleep all night beneath the open sky.

Quite suddenly the polished sticks ceased playing loudly and dropped their tone to pianissimo, so that if Juanita were to speak she could be heard.

“Hombre,” she said, “do you know Marcos de Sarrion?”

“I know the chapel of Our Lady of the Shadows,” he answered, glancing at her through a mist of wool.

“Will you give him a letter?”

“Fold it small and throw it in the wool,” he said, and immediately the sticks beat loudly again.

Juanita’s hand was already in her pocket seeking her purse.

“No, no,” he said; “I am too much caballero to take money from a lady.”

She walked away, dropping as she passed the uncarded heap, a folded paper which was lost amid the fluff.  The sticks flew this way and that, and the twisted note shot up into the air with a bunch of wool which fell across the two sticks and was presently cast aside upon the carded heap.  And peeping eyes from the barred windows of the convent school saw nothing.

Marcos and his father had returned to Saragossa.  They were people of influence in that city, and Saragossa, strange to say, had a desire to maintain law and order within its walls.  It was unlike Barcelona, which is at all times republican and frankly turbulent.  Its other neighbour, Pampeluna, remains to this day clerical and mysterious.  It is the city of the lost causes; Carlism and the Church.  The Sarrions were not looked upon with a kindly eye within the walls of the Northern fortress and it is much too small a town for any to pass unobserved in its streets.

There was work to do in Saragossa.  In Pampeluna there were only suspicions to arouse.  Juanita was in Sor Teresa’s care and could scarcely come to harm, holding in her hand as she did a strong card to be played on emergency.

All Spain seemed to be pausing breathlessly.  The murder of Prim had shaken the land like an earthquake.  The king had already made enemies.  He had no enthusiasm.  His new subjects would have preferred a few mistakes to this cautious pause.  They were a people vaguely craving for liberty before they had cast off the habit of servitude.

No Latin race will ever evolve a great republic; for it must be ruled.  But Spain was already talking of democracy and the new king had scarcely seated himself on the throne.

“We can do nothing,” said Sarrion, “but try to keep order in our own small corner of this bear-garden.”

So he remained at Saragossa and threw open his great house there, while Marcos passed to and fro into Navarre up the Valley of the Wolf to Torre Garda.