er than Morano. Serafina was delighted
with the forest, but between Rodriguez and its beautiful grandeur his
anxieties crowded thickly. He leaned over once from the chariot and
asked one of the bowmen again about that castle; but the bowman only
bowed and answered with a proverb of Spain, not easily carried so far
from its own soil to thrive in our language, but signifying that the
morrow showeth all things. He was silent then, for he knew that there
was no way to a direct answer through those proverbs, and after a while
perhaps there came to him some of Serafina's trustfulness. By evening
they came to a wide avenue leading to great gates.

Rodriguez did not know the avenue, he knew no paths so wide in Shadow
Valley; but he knew those gates. They were the gates of iron that led
nowhere. But now an avenue went from them upon the other side, and
opened widely into a park dotted with clumps of trees. And the two
great iron shields, they too had changed with the changes that had
bewitched the forest, for their surfaces that had glowed so
unmistakably blank, side by side in the firelight, not many nights
before, blazoned now the armorial bearings of Rodriguez upon the one
and those of the house of Dawnlight upon the other. Through the opened
gates they entered the young park that seemed to wonder at its own
ancient trees, where wild deer drifted away from them like shadows
through the evening: for the bowmen had driven in deer for miles
through the forest. They passed a pool where water-lilies lay in
languid beauty for hundreds of summers, but as yet no flower peeped
into the water, for the pond was all hallowed newly.

A clump of trees stood right ahead of their way; they passed round it;
and Castle Rodriguez came all at once into view. Serafina gasped
joyously. Rodriguez saw its towers, its turrets for archers, its
guarded windows deep in the mass of stone, its solemn row of
battlements, but he did not believe what he saw. He did not believe
that here at last was his castle, that here was his dream fulfilled and
his journey done. He expected to wake suddenly in the cold in some
lonely camp, he expected the Ebro to unfold its coils in the North and
to come and sweep it away. It was but another strayed hope, he thought,
taking the form of dream. But Castle Rodriguez still stood frowning
there, and none of its towers vanished, or changed as things change in
dreams; but the servants of the King of Shadow Valley opened the gre