"Oh--it was not when he was killed that I forgave him."
"Then when was it?"
Juanita laughed lightly and shook her head.
"I am not going to tell you that," she answered. "It is a secret between Evasio Mon and myself. He will understand when I place the flowers on his grave ... as much as men ever do understand."
She vouchsafed no explanation of this ambiguous speech, but sat in silence looking with contemplative eyes across the valley. Sarrion was seated a few yards away. At times he glanced through the cigarette smoke at Juanita and Marcos. Suddenly he drew in his feet and sat upright.
"Dinner at seven to-night," he said, briskly. "If you have no objection."
"Why?" asked Juanita.
"I am going to Saragossa."
"To-night?" she asked hastily and stopped short. Marcos sat motionless. Sarrion lighted another cigarette and forgot to answer her question. Juanita flushed and held her lips between her teeth. Then she turned her head and looked at Sarrion from the corner of her eyes. She searched him from his keen, brown face--said by some to be the handsomest face in Spain--to his neat and firmly planted feet. But there was nothing written for her to read. He had forced her hand and she did not know whether he had done it on purpose or not. She knew her own mind, however. She was called upon to decide her whole life then and there. And she knew her own mind.
"Seven o'clock," said the mistress of Torre Garda, rising and going towards the house. "I will go at once and see to it."