ace. Juanita, usually voluble enough, seemed to have nothing to say to
Sor Teresa. The driver could possibly overhear the conversation of his
passengers. For this, or for another reason, Sor Teresa was silent.

As they approached the hills, they found themselves in a more broken
country. They climbed and descended with a rather irritating regularity.
The spurs of the Pyrenees keep their form right down to the plains and
the road to Torre Garda passes over them. Juanita leant sideways out of
the carnage and stared upwards into the pine trees.

"Do you see anything?" asked Sor Teresa.

"No--I can see nothing."

"There is a chapel up there, on the slope."

"Our Lady of the Shadows," answered Juanita and lapsed into silence
again. She knew now why the name had struck her with such foreboding,
when she had learnt it from the lips of the laughing young captain of
infantry.

It told of calamity--the greatest that can happen to a woman--to be
married without love.

The driver turned in his seat and tried to overhear. He seemed uneasy and
looked about him with quick turns of the head. At last, when his horses
were mounting a hill, he turned round.

"Did these sainted ladies hear anything?" he asked.

"No," answered Sor Teresa. "Why do you ask?"

"There has been a man on horseback on the road behind us," he answered
with assumed carelessness, "all the way from Pampeluna. He has now taken
a short cut and is in front on the road above us; I can hear him; that is
all."

And he gave a little cry to his horses; the signal for them to trot. They
were approaching the mouth of the Valley of the Wolf, and could hear the
sound of its wild waters in the darkness below them. The valley opens out
like a fan with either slope rising at an easy angle to the pine woods.
The road is a cornice cut on the western bank upon which side it runs for
ten miles until the bridge below the village of Torre Garda leads it
across the river to the sunny slope where the village crouches below the
ancient castle from which the name is taken.

The horses were going at a walking pace now, and the driver to show,
perhaps, his nonchalance and fearlessness was humming a song beneath his
breath, when suddenly the hillside burst into flame and a deafening roar
of musketry stunned both horses and driver. Juanita happened to be
looking up at the hillside and she saw the fire run along like a snake of
flame in the grass. In a moment the carriage had swung r