Where Evasio Mon might be, no man knew.  Paris had fallen.  The Commune was rife.  France was wallowing in the deepest degradation.  And in Bayonne the Carlist plotters schemed without let or hindrance.

“So long as he is away we need not be uneasy about Juanita,” said Marcos.  “He cannot return to Saragossa without my hearing of it.”

And one evening a casual teamster from the North, whose great two-wheeled cart, as high as a house and as long as a locomotive, stood in the dusty road outside the Posada de los Reyes, dropped in, cigarette in mouth, to the Palacio Sarrion.  In Spain, a messenger delivers neither message nor letter to a servant.  A survival of mediaeval habits permits the humblest to seek the presence of the great at any time of day.

The Sarrions had just finished dinner and still sat in the vast dining-room, the walls of which glittered with arms and loomed darkly with great portraits of the Spanish school of painting.

The teamster was not abashed.  It was a time of war, and war is a great leveler of social scales.  He had brought his load through a disturbed country.  He was a Guipuzcoan—­as good as any man.

“It was about the Senor Mon,” he said.  “You wished to hear of him.  He returned to Pampeluna two days ago.”

The teamster thanked their Excellencies, but he could not accept their hospitality because he had ordered his supper at his hotel.  It was only at the Posada de los Reyes in all Saragossa that one procured the real cuisine of Guipuzcoa.  Yes, he would take a glass of wine.

And he took it with a fine wave of the arm, signifying that he drank to the health of his host.

“Evasio Mon will not leave us long idle,” said Sarrion, when the man had gone, and he had hardly spoken when the servant ushered in a second visitor, a man also of the road, who handed to Marcos a crumpled and dirty envelope.  He had nothing to say about it, so bowed and withdrew.  He was a man of the newer stamp, for he was a railway worker, having that which is considered a better manner.  He knew his place, and that knowledge had affected his manhood.

The letter he gave to Marcos bore no address.  It was sealed, however, in red wax, which had the impress of Nature’s seal, a man’s thumb—­unique and not to be counterfeited.

From the envelope Marcos took a twisted paper, not innocent of carded wool.

“We are going back to Saragossa,” Juanita wrote.  “I have refused to go into religion, but they say it is too late; that I cannot draw back now.  Is this true?”

Marcos passed the note across to his father.

“I wish this was Barcelona,” he said, with a sudden gleam in his grave eyes.

“Why?”

“Because then we could pull the school down about their ears and take Juanita away.”

Sarrion smiled.

“Or get shot mysteriously from a window while attempting it,” he said.  “No, we fight with finer weapons than that.  Mon has got his dispensation from Rome ... a few hours too late.”