rano cooked bacon. Then while Rodriguez slept Morano took
his cloak and did all that could be done by brushing and smoothing to
give back to it that air that it some time had, before it had flapped
upon so many winds and wrapped Rodriguez on such various beds, and met
the vicissitudes that make this story.

For the plume he could do little.

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, ev