And there the man stood holding his candle high, and the rays of the moon became more magical still beside that little mundane, flickering thing.  And Serafina was moving through the moonlight as though its rays were her sisters, which she met noiselessly and brightly upon some island, as it seemed to Rodriguez, beyond the costs of Earth, so quietly and so brightly did her slender figure move and so aloof from him appeared her eyes.  And there came on Rodriguez that feeling that some deride and that others explain away, the feeling of which romance is mainly made and which is the aim and goal of all the earth.  And his love for Serafina seemed to him not only to be an event in his life but to have some part in veiled and shadowy destinies and to have the blessing of most distant days:  grey beards seemed to look out of graves in forgotten places to wag approval:  hands seemed to beckon to him out of far-future times, where faces were smiling quietly:  and, dreaming on further still, this vast approval that gave benediction to his heart’s youthful fancy seemed to widen and widen like the gold of a summer’s evening or, the humming of bees in summer in endless rows of limes, until it became a part of the story of man.  Spring days of his earliest memory seemed to have their part in it, as well as wonderful evenings of days that were yet to be, till his love for Serafina was one with the fate of earth; and, wandering far on their courses, he knew that the stars blessed it.  But Serafina went up to the man on the couch with no look for Rodriguez.

With no look for Rodriguez she bent over the stricken hidalgo.  He raised himself a little on one elbow.  “It is nothing,” he said, “Serafina.”

Still she bent over him.  He laid his head down again, but now with open and undimmed eyes.  She put her hand to his forehead, she spoke in a low voice to him; she lavished upon him sympathy for which Rodriguez would have offered his head to swords; and all, thought Rodriguez for three blows from a knave’s frying-pan:  and his anger against Morano flared up again fiercely.  Then there came another thought to him out of the shadows, where Serafina was standing all white, a figure of solace.  Who was this man who so mysteriously blended with the other unknown things that haunted the gloom of that chamber?  Why had he fought him at night?  What was he to Serafina?  Thoughts crowded up to him from the interior of the darkness, sombre and foreboding as the shadows that nursed them.  He stood there never daring to speak to Serafina; looking for permission to speak, such as a glance might give.  And no glance came.