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disgraced to all eternity. Look away and let me walk on unrecognized. And now, farewell."
    "Farewell," the captain called after him, "and may heaven assist you in your undertaking."
    While the Marquis was striding off, Saracho turned to the captain and said in a low voice, "I doubt if the Marques de Bolibar —"
    He broke off, for the Marquis had halted and looked back.
    "You turn your head on hearing your name, Señor Marques," Saracho called, laughing loudly. "That is how I shall know you again."
    "You're right, and I thank you. I must teach my ear to be deaf to the sound of my name."
    That, it seems, was the moment when the Marquis of Bolibar hit upon the idea whose execution I observed in his garden the following day, not that I grasped the purpose of such a strange proceeding. Lieutenant von Röhn, meanwhile, was consumed with fear and impatience. Knowing that he alone could preserve the Nassau Regiment from the danger that threatened it at La Bisbal, he could hardly wait for his servant to release him from his hiding place and convey him there. He was tormented by the fear that Bolibar, having reached the town before him and vanished unhindered into the crowd, would put his terrible scheme into effect.
    But now at last Saracho gave the order to depart. The guerrillas promptly sprang to their feet and began bustling to and fro. Some fetched the wounded from the chapel, others loaded the mules with baskets of victuals, wineskins, and valises. Some sang as they worked, a few bickered, the mules set up a piercing din, the muleteers cursed. In the midst of this turmoil the British captain suspended his camp kettle over the fire and prepared some tea for breakfast. Saracho, who had attached a lantern and a mirror to the tree beside the Virgin and Child, was shaving in haste. Glancing at the mirror and the Madonna in turn, he scraped away at his beard and prayed as he did so.
     
     

SNOW ON THE ROOFS
    At the hour of the rosary, or vespers, on the evening of the same day, the Marquis of Bolibar made his way without let or hindrance through the Puerta del Sol. No one recognized him, and he might well have escaped detection, like an eel in a turbid stream, amid the water-carriers and fishmongers, spice and oil merchants, wool-dressers and friars who crowded around the church door to say their Hail Marys and greet familiar faces. It was, however, his misfortune to become privy to the secret that bound the five of us together - the other four and myself - with bonds of memory. What secret? Ours and that of the dead Françoise-Marie, which at other times we kept locked away in the depths of our hearts, and of which we that night bragged to one another, fuddled with Alicante wine and stricken with homesickness by the sight of the snow on the roofs.
    And the ragged muleteer who sat in the corner of my room, a rosary in his hands, overheard that secret and had to die.
    We ordered him shot beside the town wall, secretly and in haste, without trial or absolution. None of us dreamed that it was the Marquis of Bolibar who fell bleeding into the snow beneath our bullets, nor did we guess what a curse he had laid upon us before he died.
    I had command of the gate guard that evening. Toward six o'clock I detailed the night pickets that were to patrol the town wall at intervals of half an hour. My sentries, with their loaded carbines hidden beneath their cloaks, stood silent and motionless like saints in their niches.
    It began to snow. Snowy weather was no great rarity in that mountainous region, it seemed, but we had never seen snowflakes in Spain before that evening.
    I had two copper pans filled with glowing ashes brought to my room, there being no stoves in the houses of La Bisbal. The smoke stung my eyes and the snowstorm made the windows rattle with a faint, menacing sound, but the room was warm and snug. In the corner lay my couch of freshly gathered heather with a cloak draped over it. The makeshift table and benches were fashioned