s, with the quiet
persistence learnt from watching Nature.

"Are you a Jesuit?" he asked bluntly.

But Leon only drew in a gasping breath and made no answer.

Then Marcos went out and closed the door behind him.

CHAPTER XIV

IN THE CLOISTER
Marcos and Sarrion went back to Pampeluna in the dusk of the winter
evening, each meditating over that which they had seen and heard. Leon
had become a Jesuit. And Juanita was worse--infinitely worse than alone
in the world.

Marcos needed no telling of all that lay behind Leon's scared silence;
for his father had brought him up in an atmosphere of plain language and
wide views of mankind. Sarnon himself had seen Navarre ruined, its men
sacrificed, its women made miserable by a war which had lasted
intermittently for thirty years. He had seen the simple Basques, who had
no means of verifying that which their priests told them, fighting
desperately and continuously for a lie. The Carlist war has always been
the war of ignorance and deceit against enlightenment and the advance of
thought. It is needless to say upon which side the cassock has ranged
itself.

The Basques were promised their liberty; they should be allowed to live
as they had always lived, practically a republic, if they only succeeded
in forcing an absolute monarchy on the rest of Spain. The Jesuits made
this promise. The society found itself in the position that no promise
must be allowed to stick in the throat.

Sarrion, like all who knew their strange story, was ready enough to
recognise the fact that the Jesuit body must be divided into two parts of
head and heart. The heart has done the best work that missionaries have
yet accomplished. The head has ruined half Europe.

It was the political Jesuit who had earned Sarrion's deadly hatred.

The political Jesuit has, moreover, a record in history which has only in
part been made manifest.

William the Silent was assassinated by an emissary of the Jesuits.
Maurice of Orange, his son, almost met the same fate, and the would-be
murderer confessed. Three Jesuits were hanged for attempting the life of
Elizabeth, Queen of England; and later, another, Parry, was drawn and
quartered. Two years later another was executed for participating in an
attempt on the Queen's life; and at later periods four more met a similar
just fate. Ravaillac, the assassin of Henry IV of France was a Jesuit.

The Jesuits were concerned in the Gunpowder Plot of England and two of