“They flower for others, Señora,” Sard said.
“Others do not taste with my tongue,” she said. “But since God favours others, it is enough. Vaya con Dios, Señor.”
“Adios, Señora.”
He went, as she had told him, up the drive to the lodge, which was ruinous but inhabited, since a negro child was crying in it. The gates were locked, as she had said, but he could pass by a gap in the fence into the road. The fence was mainly gap: it might have been said that the gaps had fence in them. The forest shut in the road, which went on the right hand (as he judged) to a bridge over the river, and on the left hand to the savannah and Las Palomas. Sard walked back to Las Palomas and went on board his ship to his cabin.
Sitting there, on his red velvet settle, he wondered what it all meant. On an unforgettable day fourteen years before, when he was a boy, he had met a girl, who had changed his life for him. He had met her by a succession of chances and had never seen her since. Four years later, he had been told in a dream, such as no one could neglect, that he would meet the girl again at Los Xicales.
After the dream, life had kept him away from following his fancy: he had had to serve his time and make his way. Five years after the dream, he had been free for a while: he had gone to Spain to look for the girl, but had found no trace of her.
“And now that I come to Los Xicales,” he said, “I find the house shut up and her name not known. Whenever I hope to make this more than a dream, it goes to nothing.”
He looked from his ports upon the deck of the ship. He told himself that he was a grown man who ought not to let himself be swayed by a dream. “As for the girl,” he told himself, “she is dead or has forgotten, or is where I shall never see her.”
“I will put her right out of my mind,” he said. He tried to interest himself in a book, but found it impossible. “I cannot put her out of my mind,” he said. “She is all twined into it and part of it. And the dream tells truth. Probably she is at Los Xicales now and needs my help.”
As this thought was unbearable, he went ashore again to make sure. “She will be there this time,” he told himself. “Beyond all doubt she will be there this time.” Presently he was at the lodge gates, making sure.