He continued his walk, sombred by the thought that in the gloom of
the trees was the next progression from the openness of the sky
over those who strolled the night-flower hedge. Oh, he knew the
game when of old no shadow was too deep, no ruse of concealment too
furtive, to veil a love moment. After all, humans were like
flowers, he meditated. Under the radiance from the lighted lanai,
ere entering the irritating movement of life again to which he
belonged, he paused to stare, scarcely seeing, at a flaunt of
display of scarlet double-hibiscus blooms. And abruptly all that
he was suffering, all that he had just observed, from the night-
blooming hedge and the two-by-two love-murmuring humans to the pair
like thieves in each other's arms, crystallized into a parable of
life enunciated by the day-blooming hibiscus upon which he gazed,
now at the end of its day. Bursting into its bloom after the dawn,
snow-white, warming to pink under the hours of sun, and quickening
to scarlet with the dark from which its beauty and its being would
never emerge, it seemed to him that it epitomized man's life and
passion.
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