"We shall meet him on the road," said Sor Teresa with a note of anxiety in her voice. Presently she stood up in the carriage which was an open one on high wheels and spoke to the driver in a low voice into his ear. He was a stout and respectable man with a good ecclesiastical clientèle in the pious capital of Navarre. He had a confidential manner.
The distant firing had ceased now and a great stillness reigned over the bare land. There are no trees here to harbour birds or to rustle in the wind. The man, nursing his horses for the long journey, drove at an easy pace. Juanita, usually voluble enough, seemed to have nothing to say to Sor Teresa. The driver could possibly overhear the conversation of his passengers. For this, or for another reason, Sor Teresa was silent.
As they approached the hills, they found themselves in a more broken country. They climbed and descended with a rather irritating regularity. The spurs of the Pyrenees keep their form right down to the plains and the road to Torre Garda passes over them. Juanita leant sideways out of the carnage and stared upwards into the pine trees.
"Do you see anything?" asked Sor Teresa.
"No--I can see nothing."
"There is a chapel up there, on the slope."
"Our Lady of the Shadows," answered Juanita and lapsed into silence again. She knew now why the name had struck her with such foreboding, when she had learnt it from the lips of the laughing young captain of infantry.
It told of calamity--the greatest that can happen to a woman--to be married without love.
The driver turned in his seat and tried to overhear. He seemed uneasy and looked about him with quick turns of the head. At last, when his horses were mounting a hill, he turned round.
"Did these sainted ladies hear anything?" he asked.