ted face. "I knew that it was easy to forget the dead, but
to forgive ..."

"Oh--it was not when he was killed that I forgave him."

"Then when was it?"

Juanita laughed lightly and shook her head.

"I am not going to tell you that," she answered. "It is a secret between
Evasio Mon and myself. He will understand when I place the flowers on his
grave ... as much as men ever do understand."

She vouchsafed no explanation of this ambiguous speech, but sat in
silence looking with contemplative eyes across the valley. Sarrion was
seated a few yards away. At times he glanced through the cigarette smoke
at Juanita and Marcos. Suddenly he drew in his feet and sat upright.

"Dinner at seven to-night," he said, briskly. "If you have no objection."

"Why?" asked Juanita.

"I am going to Saragossa."

"To-night?" she asked hastily and stopped short. Marcos sat motionless.
Sarrion lighted another cigarette and forgot to answer her question.
Juanita flushed and held her lips between her teeth. Then she turned her
head and looked at Sarrion from the corner of her eyes. She searched him
from his keen, brown face--said by some to be the handsomest face in
Spain--to his neat and firmly planted feet. But there was nothing written
for her to read. He had forced her hand and she did not know whether he
had done it on purpose or not. She knew her own mind, however. She was
called upon to decide her whole life then and there. And she knew her own
mind.

"Seven o'clock," said the mistress of Torre Garda, rising and going
towards the house. "I will go at once and see to it."

She, presumably, carried out her intention of visiting Evasio Mon's
grave, and perhaps said a prayer in the little chapel near to it for the
repose of the soul of the man whom she had forgiven so suddenly and
completely. She did not return to the terrace at all events, and the
Sarrions went about their own affairs during the afternoon without seeing
her again.

At dinner Sarrion was unusually light-hearted and Juanita accommodated
herself to his humour with that ease which men so rarely understand in
women and seldom acquire for themselves. Sarrion spoke of Saragossa as if
it were across the road and intimated that he would be coming and going
between the two houses during the spring, and until the great heats made
the plains of Aragon uninhabitable.

"But," he said, "you see how it is with Marcos. The Valley of the Wolf is
his care and he dare not leave it