ke any human heart, in dull
weather, and murmuring dismally when the sun shone and the birds were
singing in the trees.

In clearest summer weather, the water would sometimes run thick and
yellow for days, the result of some landslip where the snow and ice were
melting. Sometimes the Wolf would hurl down a mass of debris--a forest
torn from the mountainside by avalanche, the dead bodies of a few stray
sheep, or a fox or a wolf or the dun corpse of a mountain bear. Many in
the valley had seen tables and chairs and the roof, perhaps, of a house
caught in the timbers of the old bridge below the village. And the river,
of course, had exacted its toll from more than one family. It was
jocularly said at the Venta that the Wolf was Royalist; for in the first
Carlist war it had fought for Queen Christina, doing to death a whole
company of insurgents at that which is known as the False Ford, where it
would seem that a child could pass while in reality no horseman might
hope to get through.

The house of Torre Garda was not itself ancient though it undoubtedly
stood on the site of some mediaeval watch-tower. It had been built in the
days of Ferdinand VII at the period when French architecture was running
rife over the world, and had the appearance of a Gascon chateau. It was a
long low house of two stories. Every room on the ground floor opened with
long French windows to a terrace built to the edge of the plateau, where
a fountain splashed its clear spring water into a stone basin, where gray
stone urns stood on lichen-covered pillars amid flower-beds.

Every room on the first floor had windows opening on a wide balcony which
ran the length of the house and was protected from the rain and midday
sun by the far-stretching eaves of the roof. The house was of gray stone,
roofed with slabs of the same, such as peel off the slopes of the
Pyrenees and slide one over the other to the valleys below. The pointed
turrets at each corner were roofed with the small green tiles that the
Moors loved. The winds and the snow and the rain had toned all Torre
Garda down to a cool gray-green against which the four cypress trees on
the terrace stood rigid like sentinels keeping eternal guard over the
valley.

Above the house rose a pine-slope where the snow lingered late into the
summer. Above this again were rocks and broken declivities of sliding
stones; and, crowning all, the everlasting snow.

From the terrace of Torre Garda a strong voice