“Morano,” he said, “buy bacon.”

Morano’s eyes brightened:  they were forty-five miles from the hills on which he had last tasted bacon.  He selected his house with a glance, and then he was gone.  And Rodriguez reflected too late that he had forgotten to tell Morano where he should find him, and this with night coming on in a strange village.  Scarcely, Rodriguez reflected, he knew where he was going himself.  Yet if old tunes lurking in its hollows, echoing though imperceptibly from long-faded evenings, gave the mandolin any knowledge of human affairs that other inanimate things cannot possess, the mandolin knew.

Let us in fancy call up the shade of Morano from that far generation.  Let us ask him where Rodriguez is going.  Those blue eyes, dim with the distance over which our fancy has called them, look in our eyes with wonder.

“I do not know,” he says, “where Don Rodriguez is going.  My master did not tell me.”

Did he notice nothing as they rode by that balcony?

“Nothing,” Morano answers, “except my master riding.”

We may let Morano’s shade drift hence again, for we shall discover nothing:  nor is this an age to which to call back spirits.

Rodriguez strolled slowly on the deep dust of that street as though wondering all the while where he should go; and soon he and his mandolin were below that very balcony whereon he had seen the white neck of Serafina gleam with the last of the daylight.  And now the spells of the moon charmed Earth with their full power.

The balcony was empty.  How should it have been otherwise?  And yet Rodriguez grieved.  For between the vision that had drawn his footsteps and that bare balcony below shuttered windows was the difference between a haven, sought over leagues of sea, and sheer, uncharted cliff.  It brought a wistfulness into the music he played, and a melancholy that was all new to Rodriguez, yet often and often before had that mandolin sent up through evening against unheeding Space that cry that man cannot utter; for the spirit of man needs a mandolin as a comrade to face the verdict of the chilly stars as he needs a bulldog for more mundane things.

Soon out of the depth of that stout old mandolin, in which so many human sorrows had spun tunes out of themselves, as the spiders spin misty grey webs, till it was all haunted with music, soon the old cry went up to the stars again, a thread of supplication spun of the matter which else were distilled in tears, beseeching it knew not what.  And, but that Fate is deaf, all that man asks in music had been granted then.