He had played his mandolin. It had uttered to the solemn hush of
the understanding evening all it was able to tell; and after that
cry, grown piteous with so many human longings, for it was an old
mandolin, Rodriguez felt there was nothing left for his poor words
to say. So he went dumb and mournful.
Serafina would have heard him had he spoken, for her thoughts
vibrated yet with the voice of the mandolin, which had come to her
hearing as an ambassador from Rodriguez, but he found no words to
match with the mandolin's high mood. His eyes said, and his sighs
told, what the mandolin had uttered; but his tongue was silent.
And then Serafina said, as he walked all heavy with silence past a
curving slope of dimly glowing azaleas, "You like flowers, senor?"
"Senorita, I adore them," he replied.
"Indeed?" said Dona Serafina.
"Indeed I do," said Rodriguez.
"And yet," asked Dona Serafina, "was it not a somewhat withered or
altogether faded flower that you carried, unless I fancied wrong,
when you rode past our balcony?"
"It was indeed faded," said Rodriguez, "for the rose was some
weeks old."
"One who loved flowers, I thought," said Serafina, "would perhaps
care more for them fresh."
Half-dumb though Rodriguez was his shrewdness did not desert him.
To have said that he had the rose from Serafina would have been to
claim as though proven what was yet no more than a hope.
"Senorita," he said, "I found the flower on holy ground.
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