He sat back and looked at the Sarrions with his little, cunning eyes twinkling beneath his gold laced cap.  The expansiveness would not last much longer.  Sarrion’s dark glance was diagnosing the man with a deadly skill.

“The thing,” he said slowly, “is to strike while the iron is hot.”

He spoke in the symbolic way of a people much given to proverbial wisdom and the dark uses of allegory.  He might have meant much or nothing.  As it happened, the Count de Sarrion meant nothing; for he knew nothing.

“That is what I say.  Give me a couple of months, I want no more.”

“No?” said Sarrion, looking at him with much admiration.  “Is that so?”

“Two months—­and the sum of money I named.”

“Ah!  In two months,” reflected Sarrion.  “Rome, you know, was not built in a day.”

The General gave his cackling laugh.

“Aha! " he cried, “I see that you know all about it.  You gave me my cue—­the word Rome, eh?  To see how much I know!”

And the great soldier-statesman leant back in his seat again, well pleased with himself.

“I understand,” he said, “that it amounts to this; the sanction of the Vatican is required to the remittance of the usual novitiate in the case of a young person who is in a great hurry to take the veil; once that is obtained the money is set at liberty and all goes merrily.  There is enough to—­well, let us say—­to convince my whole army corps, and my humble self.  And the Vatican will, of course, consent.  I fancy that is how it stands.”

He tapped his pocket as if the golden “pieces de conviction” were already there, and closed his eye like any common person; like, for instance, his own father, who was an Andalusian innkeeper.

“I fancy that is how it is,” said Sarrion, turning gravely to Marcos.  “Is it not so?”

“That is how it is,” replied Marcos.

The effect of the good dinner was already wearing off.  The train had started, and General Pacheco found himself disinclined for further conversation.  He begged leave to ease some of the tighter straps and hooks of his smart tunic, opening the collar of solid gold lace that encircled his thick neck.  In a few minutes he was asleep beneath the speculative eye of Marcos, who sat in the far corner of the carriage.

The General was going to Saragossa, so they parted from him in the cold, early morning at Castejon, where an icy wind swept over the plain, and the snow lay thick on the ground.

“It will be cold at Pampeluna!” muttered the General from within the hood of his military cloak.  “I pity you! yes, good-bye; close the door.”

The station was full of soldiers, and their high peaked caps were at every window of the trains.  It was barely yet daylight when the Sarrions alighted at the fortified station in the plain below Pampeluna.

The city stands upon a hill which falls steeply on the northeast side to the bed of the river Arga, a green-coloured stream deep enough to give additional strength to the walls which tower above like a cliff.  Pampeluna is rightly reckoned to be the strongest city in Europe.  It is approached from the southwest by a table-land, across which run the high roads from Madrid and the French frontier.