The man made a little gesture. “Soon, I think. There is a parade fixed in an hour from now.” He went out, and Harper’s hands quivered a little as he held up the wine and glanced at Appleby. “It’s not often I don’t feel inclined to eat, but I don’t seem to have much use for breakfast now,” he said. “Here’s to the folks who’ll wonder what has happened to us back there in the country we came from!” He drank, and handed the wine to Appleby, who stood up as he put the bottle to his lips. It was, however, not Tony Palliser or Nettie Harding, but a woman with grave gray eyes, that now when the shadows were closing round him he drank to as it were reverently. She would, as Harper had suggested, never even know what had befallen him, but she seemed very near him then, and he felt the influence of her serenity upon him. He laid down the bottle, and Harper took out two cigars. “Now,” he said, “I guess when they come for me I’ll be ready.” The hour that followed seemed interminable, but at last there was a tramp of feet on the stairway, and a sergeant of cazadores who came in made a sign to them. They rose in silence, and were thrust amidst a cluster of other prisoners in the patio, while an officer reading from a paper called their names aloud. Then a guard with bayonets fixed closed in about them, and they passed out through an archway into the street. Appleby blinked about him with half‐closed eyes, for he had come out of the shadow, and the white walls were dazzlingly bright, while from out of the press of close‐packed humanity beneath them came the flash of steel. Then the crowd opened up, and a company of cazadores, that filed out of another opening halted a moment to wait for the prisoners’ guard. Appleby was driven forward and took his place among the rest, there was a ringing of bugles that drowned the hum of voices from the crowd, and they had started on their last journey to the doleful tapping of the drums. Morales, it seemed, understood his countrymen, and meant to gratify the Iberian lust of sensation which finds vent in the bull‐ring, and is akin to that which packed the amphitheatres in the days of ancient Rome. Still, Appleby noticed vacantly that the loyalist city seemed curiously unresponsive for the shout that went up when the troops moved forward died away, and the tapping of the drums broke sharply through a brief silence that was almost portentous. It was followed by a low murmuring that suggested the sound of the sea, and gazing at the rows of intent faces Appleby noticed that hats were swept off as the prisoners passed, and that here and there a man crossed himself. Once a burst of Vivas went up, but the murmurs that answered them were hoarse and angry, and for a space of minutes there was once more a heavy silence that seemed intensified by the beat of marching feet and the tapping of the drums.