“I suppose,” said Sor Teresa suddenly, “that Evasio Mon was at Torre Garda to-day.”

“Yes.”

“And you left him there when you came away.”

“Yes.”

“We shall meet him on the road,” said Sor Teresa with a note of anxiety in her voice.  Presently she stood up in the carriage which was an open one on high wheels and spoke to the driver in a low voice into his ear.  He was a stout and respectable man with a good ecclesiastical clientele in the pious capital of Navarre.  He had a confidential manner.

The distant firing had ceased now and a great stillness reigned over the bare land.  There are no trees here to harbour birds or to rustle in the wind.  The man, nursing his horses for the long journey, drove at an easy pace.  Juanita, usually voluble enough, seemed to have nothing to say to Sor Teresa.  The driver could possibly overhear the conversation of his passengers.  For this, or for another reason, Sor Teresa was silent.

As they approached the hills, they found themselves in a more broken country.  They climbed and descended with a rather irritating regularity.  The spurs of the Pyrenees keep their form right down to the plains and the road to Torre Garda passes over them.  Juanita leant sideways out of the carnage and stared upwards into the pine trees.

“Do you see anything?” asked Sor Teresa.

“No—­I can see nothing.”

“There is a chapel up there, on the slope.”

“Our Lady of the Shadows,” answered Juanita and lapsed into silence again.  She knew now why the name had struck her with such foreboding, when she had learnt it from the lips of the laughing young captain of infantry.

It told of calamity—­the greatest that can happen to a woman—­to be married without love.

The driver turned in his seat and tried to overhear.  He seemed uneasy and looked about him with quick turns of the head.  At last, when his horses were mounting a hill, he turned round.

“Did these sainted ladies hear anything?” he asked.

“No,” answered Sor Teresa.  “Why do you ask?”

“There has been a man on horseback on the road behind us,” he answered with assumed carelessness, “all the way from Pampeluna.  He has now taken a short cut and is in front on the road above us; I can hear him; that is all.”

And he gave a little cry to his horses; the signal for them to trot.  They were approaching the mouth of the Valley of the Wolf, and could hear the sound of its wild waters in the darkness below them.  The valley opens out like a fan with either slope rising at an easy angle to the pine woods.  The road is a cornice cut on the western bank upon which side it runs for ten miles until the bridge below the village of Torre Garda leads it across the river to the sunny slope where the village crouches below the ancient castle from which the name is taken.