The older man's presence suggested the Court, while Marcos was clearly intended for the Camp.
The Count de Sarrion had passed through both and had emerged half cynical, half indifferent from the slough of an evil woman's downfall.
"You would have made a good soldier," he said to Marcos, when his son at last came home to Torre Garda with an education completed in England and France.

"But there is no opening for an honest man in the Spanish Army.
Honesty is in the gutter in Spain to-day." And Marcos always followed his father's advice.

Later he found that Spain indeed offered no career to honest men at this time.

Gradually he supplanted his father in an unrecognised, indefinable monarchy in the Valley of the Wolf; and there, in the valley, they waited; as good Spaniards have waited these hundred years until such time as God's wrath shall be overpast.
"I have a long story to tell you," said the Count, when his son returned and sat down at once with a keen appetite to his first breakfast of coffee and bread.

"And I will tell it without comment, without prejudice, if I can." Marcos nodded.