elves."

"And of Juanita."

"I count her as one of ourselves," replied Sarrion quickly, for he heard
her voice in the passage. With a brief tap on the door she came in. She
was struggling with Perro.

"You have had long enough for your secrets," she said. "And now Marcos
must go to sleep. I have brought Perro to see him. He is so uneasy in his
canine mind."

Perro, low-born and eager, needed restraint to keep him from the bed
where his master lay, and Juanita continued to hold him while she spoke.

"You must remember," she said, "that it is owing to Perro that you are
here at all. If he had not come back and awakened us all you would have
been on the road still."

Sarrion glanced sharply at her, his attention caught by her version of
that which had really happened. She did not want Marcos to know that it
was she who had heard Perro; she, who had insisted that something had
happened to Marcos.

"And some Jesuit coming along the road might have found you there," she
said, "and pushed you over. It would have been so easy."

Marcos and Sarrion glanced at each other, and possibly Juanita saw the
glance as she held Perro back from his master.

"You do not know, Marcos, how they hate you. They could not hate you more
if you were a heretic. I have always known it, because Father Muro was
always trying to find things out about you in confession. He asked
questions about you--who your confessor was; if you did a pilgrimage. I
said--be quiet, Perro!--I said you never did a pilgrimage, and you were
always changing your confessor because no holy father could stand the
strain for long."

She forcibly ejected Perro from the room, and came back breathless and
laughing. "She has not a care in the world," thought Marcos, who knew
well enough the danger that he had passed through.

"But Father Muro is such an innocent old love," she went on, "that he did
it badly. He had been told to do it by the Jesuits and he made a bungle
of it. He thought that he could make a schoolgirl answer a question if
she did not want to. And no one was afraid of him. He is a dear, good,
old saint, and will assuredly go to Heaven. He is not a Jesuit, you know,
but he is afraid of them, as everybody else is, I think--" She paused and
closed the shutters to soften the growing day.

"Except Marcos," she threw back over her shoulder towards the bed, with
some far-off suggestion of anger still in her voice.

"And now he must be allowed to sleep until