Serafina would have heard him had he spoken, for her thoughts vibrated yet with the voice of the mandolin, which had come to her hearing as an ambassador from Rodriguez, but he found no words to match with the mandolin’s high mood.  His eyes said, and his sighs told, what the mandolin had uttered; but his tongue was silent.

And then Serafina said, as he walked all heavy with silence past a curving slope of dimly glowing azaleas, “You like flowers, senor?”

“Senorita, I adore them,” he replied.

“Indeed?” said Dona Serafina.

“Indeed I do,” said Rodriguez.

“And yet,” asked Dona Serafina, “was it not a somewhat withered or altogether faded flower that you carried, unless I fancied wrong, when you rode past our balcony?”

“It was indeed faded,” said Rodriguez, “for the rose was some weeks old.”

“One who loved flowers, I thought,” said Serafina, “would perhaps care more for them fresh.”

Half-dumb though Rodriguez was his shrewdness did not desert him.  To have said that he had the rose from Serafina would have been to claim as though proven what was yet no more than a hope.

“Senorita,” he said, “I found the flower on holy ground.”

“I did not know,” she said, “that you had travelled so far.”

“I found it here,” he said, “under your balcony.”

“Perchance I let it fall,” said she.  “It was idle of me.”

“I guard it still,” he said, and drew forth that worn brown rose.

“It was idle of me,” said Serafina.

But then in that scented garden among the dim lights of late evening the ghost of that rose introduced their spirits one to the other, so that the listening flowers heard Rodriguez telling the story of his heart, and, bending over the shell-bordered path, heard Serafina’s answer; and all they seemed to do was but to watch the evening, with leaves uplifted in the hope of rain.

Film after film of dusk dropped down from where twilight had been, like an army of darkness slowly pitching their tents on ground that had been lost to the children of light.  Out of the wild lands all the owls flew nearer:  their long, clear cries and the huge hush between them warned all those lands that this was not man’s hour.  And neither Rodriguez nor Serafina heard them.

In pale blue sky where none had thought to see it one smiling star appeared.  It was Venus watching lovers, as men of the crumbled centuries had besought her to do, when they named her so long ago, kneeling upon their hills with bended heads, and arms stretched out to her sweet eternal scrutiny.  Beneath her wandering rays as they danced down to bless them Rodriguez and Serafina talked low in the sight of the goddess, and their voices swayed through the flowers with whispers and winds, not troubling the little wild creatures that steal out shy in the dusk, and Nature forgave them for being abroad in that hour; although, so near that a single azalea seemed to hide it, so near seemed to beckon and whisper old Nature’s eldest secret.