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.