That day was far away, so dim and indefinite, so hopeless and so vague, that it could not be fixed in the imagination.
He turned from San Fernando with a sigh, to take up his unwilling road. He knew then how Boabdil felt on leaving the white city of Granada, turning from his last sight of his ancestral roof from the distant heights, never to return again. The swallow might come back to the turrets, the dove to her nest in the lemon tree, but a defeated and broken king could feel no more the quickening joy of home-coming. Sorrow with hope is to be borne; the heart breaks in the void of despair. The lash of Don Geronimo was driving him away, as it had driven happiness and contentment from the lives of the poor neophytes of San Fernando.
Juan rode on, his thoughts behind him, with so little heart in his enterprise that he was careless of his bridle reins, and almost unseated when his horse shied and bounded with sudden start away from something among the bushes. Juan only glimpsed it, a dark small something lying close beside a clump of tall purple sage, but he knew from the animal's alarm that it was something that belonged to and had been handled lately by man. He turned back to investigate, to discover a black hat lying in the trampled trail of several horses which had passed that way only a little while before.
Plain as the tracks of the horses were in the loose earth, Juan had crossed the trail without marking them, absorbed as he had been in his own affairs.
