And his master awoke, late in the afternoon, and went to his horse and gave Morano his orders. He was to go back with two of the horses to their last camp in the forest and take with him all their kit except one blanket and make himself comfortable there and wait till Rodriguez came.
And then Rodriguez rode slowly away, and Morano stood gazing mournfully and warningly at the mandolin; and the warnings were not lost upon Rodriguez, though he would never admit that he saw in Morano's staring eyes any wise hint that he heeded.
And Morano sighed, and went and untethered his horses; and soon he was riding lonely back to the forest. And Rodriguez taking the other way saw at once the towers of Lowlight.
Does my reader think that he then set spurs to his horse, galloping towards that house about whose balcony his dreams flew every night? No, it was far from evening; far yet from the colour and calm in which the light with never a whisper says farewell to Earth, but with a gesture that the horizon hides takes silent leave of the fields on which she has danced with joy; far yet from the hour that shone for Serafina like a great halo round her and round her mother's house.
We cannot believe that one hour more than another shone upon Serafina, or that the dim end of the evening was only hers: but these are the Chronicles of Rodriguez, who of all the things that befell him treasured most his memory of Serafina in the twilight, and who held that this hour was hers as much as her raiment and her balcony: such therefore it is in these chronicles.
And so he loitered, waiting for the slow sun to set: and when at last a tint on the walls of Lowlight came with the magic of Earth's most faery hour he rode in slowly not perhaps wholly unwitting, for all his anxious thoughts of Serafina, that a little air of romance from the Spring and the evening followed this lonely rider.
From some way off he saw that balcony that had drawn him back from the other side of the far Pyrenees. Sometimes he knew that it drew him and mostly he knew it not; yet always that curved balcony brought him nearer, ever since he turned from the field of the false Don Alvidar: the balcony held him with invisible threads, such as those with which Earth draws in the birds at evening. And there was Serafina in her balcony.
When Rodriguez saw Serafina sitting there in the twilight, just as he had often dreamed, he looked no more but lowered his head to the withered rose that he carried now in his hand, the rose that he had found by that very balcony under another moon. And, gazing still at the rose, he rode on under the balcony, and passed it, until his hoof-beats were heard no more in Lowlight and he and his horse were one dim shape between the night and the twilight. And still he held on.
He knew not yet, but only guessed, who had thrown that rose from the balcony on the night when he slept on the dust: he knew not who it was that he fought on the same night, and dared not guess what that unknown hidalgo might be to Serafina. He had no claim to more from that house, which once gave him so cold a welcome, than thus to ride by it in silence. And he knew as he rode that the cloak and the plume that he wore scarce seemed the same as those that had floated by when more than a month ago he had ridden past that balcony; and the withered rose that he carried added one more note of autumn. And yet he hoped.
And so he rode into twilight and was hid from the sight of the village, a worn, pathetic figure, trusting vaguely to vague powers of good fortune that govern all men, but that favour youth.