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.

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 plotte