"You are not real, señor," she said lightly. "I wonder if you know that?"
"It is you …" he began, his voice charged with the music about which the man's soul was builded.
"No, no," she laughed. "You are not real. You have just wandered out of an old romance like a ghost; when the sun comes up you'll have to creep back between dusty covers of a book a hundred years old."
He put out a hand towards hers on the window sill.
"Give me the little flower," he pleaded, southern lover-wise. "I shall never let it go away from its place on my heart, though I fear," and his hand crept a little closer, "that my heart will burst with the joy of it!"
The little meadow flower went from her fingers to his.
"A flower for your song, señor. A poor little flower which should have golden petals."
"Living," he murmured, no heights or depths of sentiment seeming beyond him, "it shall always be with me, a joy so sweet that it almost kills. Dead, I shall be happy just to wear it."
She laughed as he caught her hand and kissed it. The window closed softly, the shade was drawn down, and Ramon Garcia, hat still in one hand, the flower in the other, passed down the street, still singing in a gentle undertone. Drennen turned abruptly at right angles to the way he had come and passed out of the Settlement into the darkness under the trees.
Swiftness and determination had gone out of his stride. Unconsciously he allowed his feet to carry him along a well known trail which led along the flank of the wooded slope. Once or twice he stopped. Then again he moved on, always further, from the Settlement.