He asked Marcos whether he had felt his wounded shoulder or suffered from so much exertion.  And Juanita answered more fully than Marcos, giving details which she had certainly not learnt from himself.  A man having once been nursed in sickness by a woman parts with some portion of his personal liberty which she never relinquishes.

“It is the result of good nursing,” said Sarrion, slipping his hand inside Juanita’s arm and walking by her side.

“It is the result of his great strength,” she answered, with a glance towards Marcos, which he did not perceive, for he was looking straight in front of him.

“Uncle Ramon,” said Juanita, an hour later when they were sitting on the terrace together.  She turned towards him suddenly with her shrewd little smile.  “Uncle Ramon—­do you ever play Pelota?”

“Every Basque plays Pelota,” he replied.

Juanita nodded and lapsed into reflective silence.  She seemed to be arranging something in her mind.  Towards Sarrion, as towards Marcos, she assumed at times an attitude of protection, and almost of patronage, as if she knew much that was hidden from them and had access to some chamber of life of which the door was closed to all men.

“Does it ever strike you,” she said at length, “that in a game of Pelota—­supposing the ball to be endowed with a ... well a certain lower form of intelligence, the intelligence of a mere woman, for instance—­it would be rather natural for it to wonder what on earth the game was about?  It might even think that it had a certain right to know what was happening to it.”

“Yes,” admitted Sarrion, who having a quick and eager mind, understood that Juanita was preparing to speak plainly.  And at such times women always speak more plainly than men.  He lighted a cigarette, threw away the match with a little gesture which seemed to indicate that he was ready for her—­would meet her on her own ground.

“Why did Evasio Mon want me to go into religion?” she asked bluntly.

“My child—­you have three million pesetas.”

“And if I had gone into religion—­and I nearly did—­the Church would have had them?”

“Pardon me,” said Sarrion.  “The Jesuits—­not the Church.  It is not the same thing—­though the world does not yet understand that.  The Jesuits would have had the money and they would have spent it in throwing Spain into another civil war which would have been a worse war than we have seen.  The Church—­our Church—­has enemies.  It has Bismarck, and the English; but it has no worse enemy than the Jesuits.  For they play their own game.”

“At Pelota! and you and Marcos?”

“We were on the other side,” said Sarrion, with a shrug of the shoulders.

“And I have been the ball.”

Sarrion glanced at her sideways.  This was the moment that Marcos had always anticipated.  Sarrion wondered why he should have to meet it and not Marcos.  Juanita sat motionless with steady eyes fixed on the distant mountains.  He looked at her lips and saw there a faint smile not devoid of pity—­as if she knew something of which he was ignorant.  He pulled himself together; for he was a bold man who faced his fences with a smile.