And
if some critical reader ask how she did it I answer, "My good sir,
I can't tell you, because I don't know," or "My dear lady, what a
question to ask!" And where she learned to do it I cannot think,
but nothing was easier. And then she smiled to think that she had
done the very thing that her mother had warned her there was
danger in doing.
"Serafina," her mother said in that moment at the large window,
"the evening grows cold. It might be dangerous to stay there
longer." And Serafina entered the house, as she had done at the
coming of dusk on many an evening.
Rodriguez missed as much of that flash of her eyes, shot from
below the darkness of her hair, as youth in its first glory and
freedom misses. For at the point on the road called life at which
Rodriguez was then, one is high on a crag above the promontories
of watchmen, lower only than the peaks of the prophets, from which
to see such things. Yet it did not need youth to notice Serafina.
Beggars had blessed her for the poise of her head.
She turned that head a little as she went between the windows,
till Rodriguez gazing up to her saw the fair shape of her neck:
and almost in that moment the last of the daylight died. The
windows shut; and Rodriguez rode on with Morano to find the forge
that was kept by Fernandez the smith. And presently they came to
the village forge, a cottage with huge, high roof whose beams were
safe from sparks; and its fire was glowing redly into the
moonlight through the wide door made for horses, although there
seemed no work to be done, and a man with a swart moustache was
piling more logs on.
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