ful
eyes. She had seen clearly a hundred devices to relieve her of her watch
at the bedside. Marcos made excuses for her to absent herself. He found
occupations for her elsewhere. With his returning strength came anxiety
that she should lead her own life--apart from him.

"You need not try to get rid of me," she said to him one day. "And I do
not want to go for a walk with Cousin Peligros. She thinks only of her
shoes and her clothes while she walks. I would go for a walk with Perro
if I went with any one. He has a better understanding of what God made
the world for than Cousin Peligros. But I am not going to walk with any
one, thank you."

Nevertheless she absented herself. And Marcos' attempts to find
diversions for her, ceased with a suspicious suddenness. She fell into
the habit of using the drawing-room which was immediately beneath the
sick-room, and spent much of her time at the piano there.

"It keeps Marcos quiet," she explained airily to Sarrion, and vouchsafed
nothing further on the subject.

Chiefly because the music of Handel and Beethoven alone had been
encouraged by her professors, Juanita had learnt with some enthusiasm the
folk songs of the Basques, considered worthy only of the attention of the
people. She had a pretty voice, round and young with strange low notes in
it that seemed to belong not to her but to some woman who had yet to live
and suffer, or, perhaps, be happy as some few are in this uneven world.
She had caught, moreover, the trick of slurring from one note to the
other, which must assuredly have been left in Spain by the Moors. It
comes from the Far East. It was probably characteristic of those songs
that they could not sing by the waters of Babylon, when they hanged their
harps upon a tree in the strange land. For it gives to songs, sad or gay,
the minor, low clear note of exile. It rings out unexpectedly in strange
places. The boatmen of the Malabar Coast face the surf singing no other
than the refrain that the Basque women murmur over the cradle. "It keeps
Marcos quiet," said Juanita.

"I suppose," she suggested to Marcos one day when she returned to his
room and found him quiet, "that when you are well enough to ride you will
begin your journeys up and down the valley."

"Yes."

"And your endless watch over the Carlists?"

"They are making good use of their time, I hear," replied Marcos, with
the grave appreciation of a good fighter for a worthy foe.

Juanita remembered th