de Sarrion turned his horse's head that way from the dusty high road
leading southwards out of Saragossa. Sarrion had only been in Saragossa
twenty-four hours. His great house on the Paseo del Ebro had not been
thrown open for this brief visit, and he had been content to inhabit two
rooms at the back of the house. From the balcony of one he had seen the
incident related in the last chapter; and as he rode towards the convent
school he carried in his hand--not a whip--but the delicately-wrought
sword-stick which had fallen from the hand of Francisco de Mogente into
the gutter the night before.

In the grassy sedge that bordered the canal the frogs were calling to
each other with that conversational note of interrogation in their
throats which makes their music one of Nature's most sociable and
companionable sounds. In the fruit-trees on the lower land the
nightingales were singing as they only sing in Spain. It was nearly dark,
a warm evening of late spring, and there was no wind. Amid the thousand
scents of blossom, of opening buds, and a hundred flowering shrubs there
arose the subtle, soft odour of sluggish water, stirred by frogs, telling
of cool places beneath the trees where the weary and the dusty might lie
in oblivion till the morning.

The Count of Sarrion rode with a long stirrup, his spare form, six feet
in height, a straight line from heel to shoulder. His seat in the saddle
and something in his manner, at once gentle and cold, something mystic
that attracted and yet held inexorably at arm's length, lent at once a
deeper meaning to his name, which assuredly had a Moorish ring in it. The
little town of Sarrion lies far to the south, on the borders of Valencia,
in the heart of the Moorish country. And to look at the face of Ramon de
Sarrion and of his son, the still, brown-faced Marcos de Sarrion, was to
conjure up some old romance of that sun-scorched height of the