In a few minutes he was asleep beneath the
speculative eye of Marcos, who sat in the far corner of the carriage.

The General was going to Saragossa, so they parted from him in the cold,
early morning at Castejon, where an icy wind swept over the plain, and
the snow lay thick on the ground.

"It will be cold at Pampeluna!" muttered the General from within the hood
of his military cloak. "I pity you! yes, good-bye; close the door."

The station was full of soldiers, and their high peaked caps were at
every window of the trains. It was barely yet daylight when the Sarrions
alighted at the fortified station in the plain below Pampeluna.

The city stands upon a hill which falls steeply on the northeast side to
the bed of the river Arga, a green-coloured stream deep enough to give
additional strength to the walls which tower above like a cliff.
Pampeluna is rightly reckoned to be the strongest city in Europe. It is
approached from the southwest by a table-land, across which run the high
roads from Madrid and the French frontier.

The station lies in the plain across which the railway meanders like a
stream. Both bridges across the Arga are commanded, as is the railway
station, by the guns of the city. Every approach is covered by artillery.

The sun was rising as the Sarrions' carriage slowly climbed the incline
and clanked across the double drawbridges into the city. In the Plaza de
la Constitucion, the centre of the town, troops of hopeful dogs followed
each other from dust heap to dust heap, but seemed to find little of
succulence, whilst what they did find appeared to bring on a sudden and
violent indisposition. Perro gazed at them sadly from the carriage window
remembering perhaps his own dust heap days.

The Sarrions had no house in Pampeluna. Unlike the majority of the
Navarrese nobles they lived in their country house which was only twenty
miles away. They made use of the hotel in the corner of the Plaza de la
Constitucion when business or war happened to call them to Pampeluna.

They went there now and took their morning coffee.

"Two months," said Sarrion, warming himself at the stove in their simply
furnished sitting-room. "Two months, they have given that scoundrel
Pacheco to make his preparations."

"Yes--"

"So that Juanita must make her choice at once."

"They go to vespers in the Cathedral," said Marcos. "It is dusk by that
time. They cross the Calle de la Dormitaleria and go through the two
pat