Perro, it seemed, with an intelligence developed at the best and hardest of all schools, where hunger is the usher, awaited, not word, but action from his master; and had not long to wait. For Marcos rose and slowly climbed the hill towards Torre Garda, half hidden amid the pine trees on the mountain crest above him. There was a midnight train, he knew, from Pampeluna to Saragossa. The railway station was only twenty miles away, which is to this day considered quite a convenient distance in Navarre. There would be a moon soon after nightfall. There was plenty of time. That far-off ancestress of the middle-ages had, it would appear, handed down to her sons forever, with the clear cut profile, the philosophy which allows itself time to get through life unruffled. The Count de Sarrion was taking his early coffee the next morning at the open window in Saragossa when Marcos, with the dust of travel across the Alkali desert still upon him, came into the room. "I expected you," said the father. "You will like a bath. All is ready in your room. I have seen to it myself. When you are ready come back here and take your coffee." His attitude was almost that of a host. For Marcos rarely came to Saragossa. Although there was a striking resemblance of feature between the Sarrions, the father was taller, slighter and quicker in his glance, while Marcos' face seemed to bespeak a greater strength. In any common purpose it would assuredly fall to Marcos' lot to execute that which his father had conceived. The older man's presence suggested the Court, while Marcos was clearly intended for the Camp. The Count de Sarrion had passed through both and had emerged half cynical, half indifferent from the slough of an evil woman's downfall. "You would have made a good soldier," he said to Marcos, when his son at last came home to Torre Garda with an education completed in England and France. "But there is no opening for an honest man in the Spanish Army. Honesty is in the gutter in Spain to-day." And Marcos always followed his father's advice. Later he found that Spain indeed offered no career to honest men at this time. Gradually he supplanted his father in an unrecognised, indefinable monarchy in the Valley of the Wolf; and there, in the valley, they waited; as good Spaniards have waited these hundred years until such time as God's wrath shall be overpast. "I have a long story to tell you," said the Count, when his son returned and sat down at once with a keen appetite to his first breakfast of coffee and bread. "And I will tell it without comment, without prejudice, if I can." Marcos nodded. The Count had lighted a cigarette and now leant against the window which opened on to the heavily barred balcony overlooking the Calle San Gregorio. "Four nights ago," he said, "at about midnight, Francisco de Mogente returned secretly to Saragossa. I think he was coming to this house; but we shall never know that. No one knew he was coming--not even Juanita."