“To-night?” she asked hastily and stopped short.  Marcos sat motionless.  Sarrion lighted another cigarette and forgot to answer her question.  Juanita flushed and held her lips between her teeth.  Then she turned her head and looked at Sarrion from the corner of her eyes.  She searched him from his keen, brown face—­said by some to be the handsomest face in Spain—­to his neat and firmly planted feet.  But there was nothing written for her to read.  He had forced her hand and she did not know whether he had done it on purpose or not.  She knew her own mind, however.  She was called upon to decide her whole life then and there.  And she knew her own mind.

“Seven o’clock,” said the mistress of Torre Garda, rising and going towards the house.  “I will go at once and see to it.”

She, presumably, carried out her intention of visiting Evasio Mon’s grave, and perhaps said a prayer in the little chapel near to it for the repose of the soul of the man whom she had forgiven so suddenly and completely.  She did not return to the terrace at all events, and the Sarrions went about their own affairs during the afternoon without seeing her again.

At dinner Sarrion was unusually light-hearted and Juanita accommodated herself to his humour with that ease which men so rarely understand in women and seldom acquire for themselves.  Sarrion spoke of Saragossa as if it were across the road and intimated that he would be coming and going between the two houses during the spring, and until the great heats made the plains of Aragon uninhabitable.

“But,” he said, “you see how it is with Marcos.  The Valley of the Wolf is his care and he dare not leave it for many days together.”

When the parting came Juanita made light of it, herself turning Sarrion’s fur collar up about his ears and buttoning his coat.  For despite his sixty years he was a hardy man, and never made use of a closed carriage.  It was a dark night with no moon.

“It is all the better,” said Marcos.  “If the horses can see nothing, they cannot shy.”

Marcos accompanied his father down the slope to the great gate where the drawbridge had once been, sitting on the front seat beside him in the four-wheeled dogcart.  They left Juanita standing in the open doorway, waving her hand gaily, her slim form outlined against the warm lamplight within the house.

At the drawbridge Marcos bade his father farewell.  They had parted at the same spot a hundred times before.  There was but the one train from Pampeluna to Saragossa and both had made the journey many times.  There was no question of a long absence from each other; but this parting was not quite like the others.  Neither said anything except those conventional words of farewell which from constant use have lost any meaning they ever had.

Sarrion gathered the reins in his gloved hands, glanced back over the collar which Juanita had vigorously pulled up about his ears, and with a nod, drove away into the night.