general darkened from a dull pink to purple, and
then his colour ebbed away to a ghastly ashen white as he listened.

Twice he sprang up from the stone bench where he had seated himself,
ground his heel into the gravel brought from the river-bed beneath, and
muttered a characteristic imprecation, "Ten for one of their women I
have slain already--by San Vicente after this it shall be a hundred!"

For La Giralda was telling him the tale of his mother's shooting by
Nogueras.

Then all suddenly he reseated himself, and beckoned to Concha.

"Come hither," he said; "let me see these fellows' papers, and tell me
how they came into your hands!"

Concha was ready.

"The Senor, the tall stranger, had a mission to the Lady Superior of the
Convent," she began. "From Don Baltasar Varela it was, Prior of the
great Carlist Monastery of Montblanch. He trusted his papers into her
hands as a guarantee of his loyalty and good faith, and here they are!"

Concha flashed them from her bosom and laid them in the general's hands.
Usually Cabrera was blind to female charms, but upon this occasion his
eye rested with pleasure on the quick and subtle grace of the Andaluse.

"Then you are a nun?" he queried, looking sharply at her figure and
dress.

"Ah, no," replied Concha, thinking with some hopefulness that she was to
have at least a hearing, "I am not even a lay sister. The good Lady
Superior had need of a housekeeper--one who should be free of the
convent and yet able to transact business without the walls. It is a
serious thing (as your honour knows) to provision even a hundred men who
can live rough and eat sparely--how much harder to please a
convent-school filled from end to end with the best blood in Spain! And
good blood needs good feeding----"

"As I well knew when I was a butcher in Tortosa!" quoth Cabrera,
smiling. "There were a couple of ducal families within the range of my
custom, and they consumed more beef and mutton than a whole _barrio_ of
poor pottage-eaters!"

To make Cabrera smile was more than half the battle.

"You are sure they had nothing to do with the slayers of my mother?" He
was fierce again in a moment, and pulled the left flange of his
moustache into his mouth with a quick nervous movement of the fingers.

"I will undertake that no one of them hath ever been further South than
this village of Sarria," said Concha, somewhat hastily, and without
sufficient authority.

Cabrera looked at the papers. T