The news which Sergeant Cardono had to communicate was indeed fitted to shake the strongest nerves. If true, it took away from Rollo at once all hope of the success of his mission. He saw himself returning disgraced and impotent to the camp of Cabrera, either to be shot out of hand, or worse still, to be sent over the frontier as something too useless and feeble to be further employed. Briefly, the boy's news as repeated by La Giralda to the Sergeant, informed Rollo that though the court was presently at La Granja and many courtiers in the village of San Ildefonso, the royal guards through fear and hunger had mutinied and marched back to Madrid, and that the gipsies were gathering among the mountains in order to make a night attack upon the stranded and forsaken court of Spain. In the sergeant's opinion not a moment was to be lost. The object of the hill Gitanos was pure plunder, but they would think nothing of bloodshed, and would doubtless give the whole palace and town over to rapine and pillage. Themselves desperate with hunger and isolation, they had resolved to strike a blow which would ring from one end of Spain to the other. It was their intention (so the imp said) to kill the Queen-Regent and her daughter, to slaughter the ministers and courtiers in attendance, to plunder the palace from top to bottom and to give all within the neighbouring town of San Ildefonso to the sword. The programme, as thus baldly announced, was indeed one to strike all men with horror, even those who had been hardened by years of fratricidal warfare in which quarter was neither given nor expected. Besides the plunder of the palace and its occupants, the leaders of the gipsies expected that they would obtain great rewards from Don Carlos for thus removing the only obstacles to his undisputed possession of the throne of Spain. The heart of Rollo beat violently. His Scottish birth and training gave him a natural reverence for the sanctity of sickness and death, and the idea of these men plotting ghoulishly to utilise "the onlaying of the hand of Providence" (as his father would have phrased it) for the purposes of plunder and rapine, unspeakably revolted him. Immediately he called a council of war, at which, in spite of the frowns of Sergeant Cardono, little Concha Cabezos had her place. La Giralda was summoned also, but excused herself saying, "It is better that I should not know what you intend to do. I am, after all, a black-blooded Gitana, and might be tempted to reveal your secrets if I knew them. It is better therefore that I should not. Let me keep my own place as a servitor in your company, to cut the brushwood for your fire and to bring the water from the spring. In those things you will find me faithful. Trust the gipsy no further!" Rollo, remembering her loyalty in the matter of Dolores at the village of El Sarria, was about to make an objection, but a significant gesture from the Sergeant restrained him in time.