n by thought, whose universal
meaning was heard and understood, sometimes perhaps by wandering
spirits of light, beaten far by some evil thought for their heavenly
courses and passing close along the coasts of Earth.

And Rodriguez played no tune he had ever known, nor any airs that he
had heard men play in lanes in Andalusia; but he told of things that he
knew not, of sadnesses that he had scarcely felt and undreamed
exaltations. It was the hour of need, and the mandolin knew.

And when all was told that the mandolin can tell of whatever is
wistfulest in the spirit of man, a mood of merriment entered its old
curved sides and there came from its hollows a measure such as they
dance to when laughter goes over the greens in Spain. Never a song sang
Rodriguez; the mandolin said all.

And what message did Serafina receive from those notes that were
strange even to Rodriguez? Were they not stranger to her? I have said
that spirits blown far out of their course and nearing the mundane
coasts hear mortal music sometimes, and hearing understand. And if they
cannot understand those snatches of song, all about mortal things and
human needs, that are wafted rarely to them by chance passions, how
much more surely a young mortal heart, so near Rodriguez, heard what he
would say and understood the message however strange.

When Dona Mirana and her daughter rose, exchanging their little
curtsies for the low bows of Rodriguez, and so retired for the night,
the long room seemed to Rodriguez now empty of threatening omens. The
great portraits that the moon had lit, and that had frowned at him in
the moonlight when he came here before, frowned at him now no longer.
The anger that he had known to lurk in the darkness on pictured faces
of dead generations had gone with the gloom that it haunted: they were
all passionless now in the quiet light of the candles. He looked again
at the portraits eye to eye, remembering looks they had given him in
the moonlight, and all looked back at him with ages of apathy; and he
knew that whatever glimmer of former selves there lurks about portraits
of the dead and gone was thinking only of their own past days in years
remote from Rodriguez. Whether their anger had flashed for a moment
over the ages on that night a month from now, or whether it was only
the moonlight, he never knew. Their spirits were back now surely
amongst their own days, whence they deigned not to look on the days
that make these chro