The omens knew. In a weak voice and
few words the hurt man thanked him, but the apathetic faces seemed
to say What of that? And the frowning faces that he could not see
still filled the darkness with anger.
And then from the end of the chamber, dressed in white, and all
shining with moonlight, came Serafina.
Rodriguez in awed silence watched her come. He saw her pass
through the moonlight and grow dimmer, and glide to the moonlight
again that streamed through another window. A great dim golden
circle appeared at the far end of the chamber whence she had come,
as the servent returned with his candle and held it high to give
light for Dona Serafina. But that one flame seemed to make the
darkness only blacker; and for any cheerfulness it brought to the
gloom it had better never have challenged those masses of darkness
at all in that high chamber among the brooding portraits it seemed
trivial, ephemeral, modern, ill able to cope with the power of
ancient things, dead days and forgotten voices, which make their
home in the darkness because the days that have usurped them have
stolen the light of the sun.
And there the man stood holding his candle high, and the rays of
the moon became more magical still beside that little mundane,
flickering thing. And Serafina was moving through the moonlight as
though its rays were her sisters, which she met noiselessly and
brightly upon some island, as it seemed to Rodriguez, beyond the
costs of Earth, so quietly and so brightly did her slender figure
move and so aloof from him appeared her eyes.
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