"What does it mean?" he asked at length, folding the letter and replacing it in the pocket from which he had taken it. Marcos roused himself with an effort. He was sleepy. "I think it means that Evasio Mon is about," he answered. "No man in the valley would have done it," suggested Sarrion. "If any man in the valley had done it he would have put his knife into me when I lay on the road, which would have been murder." He gave a short laugh and was silent. "And the hand inside the velvet glove does not risk murder," reflected Sarrion, "They have not given up the game yet. We must be careful of ourselves." "And of Juanita." "I count her as one of ourselves," replied Sarrion quickly, for he heard her voice in the passage. With a brief tap on the door she came in. She was struggling with Perro. "You have had long enough for your secrets," she said. "And now Marcos must go to sleep. I have brought Perro to see him. He is so uneasy in his canine mind." Perro, low-born and eager, needed restraint to keep him from the bed where his master lay, and Juanita continued to hold him while she spoke. "You must remember," she said, "that it is owing to Perro that you are here at all. If he had not come back and awakened us all you would have been on the road still." Sarrion glanced sharply at her, his attention caught by her version of that which had really happened. She did not want Marcos to know that it was she who had heard Perro; she, who had insisted that something had happened to Marcos. "And some Jesuit coming along the road might have found you there," she said, "and pushed you over. It would have been so easy." Marcos and Sarrion glanced at each other, and possibly Juanita saw the glance as she held Perro back from his master. "You do not know, Marcos, how they hate you. They could not hate you more if you were a heretic. I have always known it, because Father Muro was always trying to find things out about you in confession. He asked questions about you--who your confessor was; if you did a pilgrimage. I said--be quiet, Perro!--I said you never did a pilgrimage, and you were always changing your confessor because no holy father could stand the strain for long." She forcibly ejected Perro from the room, and came back breathless and laughing. "She has not a care in the world," thought Marcos, who knew well enough the danger that he had passed through. "But Father Muro is such an innocent old love," she went on, "that he did it badly. He had been told to do it by the Jesuits and he made a bungle of it. He thought that he could make a schoolgirl answer a question if she did not want to. And no one was afraid of him. He is a dear, good, old saint, and will assuredly go to Heaven. He is not a Jesuit, you know, but he is afraid of them, as everybody else is, I think--" She paused and closed the shutters to soften the growing day.