t patiently beneath the
trailing vines, noting their slow approach. He was a white-haired man,
and his face was burnt a deep brown. It was an odd face, and the
expression of the eyes was not the usual expression of an old man's eyes.
They had the agricultural calm, which is rarely seen in drawing-rooms.
For those who deal with nature rarely feel calm in a drawing-room. They
want to get out of it, and their eyes assume a hunted look. This seemed
to be a man who had known both drawing-room and nature; who must have
turned quietly and deliberately to nature as the better part. The
wrinkles on his face were not those of the social smile, which so
disfigure the faces of women when the smile is no longer wanted. They
were the wrinkles of sunshine.

"I will wait," he said placidly to himself in English, with, however, a
strong American accent. "I have waited fifteen years--and she doesn't
know I am coming."

He sat looking across the river with quiet eyes. The city lay before him,
with the spire of its unmatched cathedral, the domes of its second
cathedral, and its many towers outlined against the sky just as he had
seen them fifteen years before--just as others had seen them a hundred
years earlier.

The great rounded cloud was nearer to the moon now. Now it touched it.
And quite suddenly the domes disappeared. Don Francisco de Mogente rose
and went towards the boat. He did not trouble to walk gently or to loosen
the chains noiselessly. The wind was roaring so loudly that a listener
twenty yards away could have heard nothing. He cast off and then hastened
to the stern of the boat. The way in which he handled the helm showed
that he knew the tricks of the old ferryman by wind and calm, by high and
low river. He had probably learnt them with the photographic accuracy
only to be attained when the mind is young.

The boat swung out into the river with an odd jerking movement, which the
steersman soon corrected. And a man who had been watching on the bridge
half a mile farther down the river hurried into the town. A second
watcher at an open window in the tall house next to the Posada de los
Reyes on the Paseo del Ebro closed his field-glasses with a thoughtful
smile.

It seemed that Don Francisco de Mogente had purposely avoided crossing
the bridge, where to this day the night watchman, with lantern and spear,
peeps cautiously to and fro--a startlingly mediaeval figure. It seemed
also that the traveler was expected, though