The stranger, then, being filled, cleansed and in warm raiment, stretched himself before the fire, and broke silence. He was still surly, but the grudge was not audible in his voice. “I took your fire for a gypsy camp, and was glad enough of it. I've come by the hills from Winterslow since dusk. You were right, though: I was done. I couldn't have dragged another furlong.”
Senhouse nodded. “I thought not. Been long on the road?”
“Two months.”
“From the North, I think? From Yorkshire?”
The stranger grunted his replies. His host judged that he had reasons for his reticence. There was a pause.
“You sup late,” was then observed.
Senhouse replied, “I generally do. I take two meals a day—the first at noon, the second at midnight; but I believe that I could do without one of them. I never was much of an eater—and I need very little sleep. Somehow, although I am out at sunrise most mornings, I rarely sleep till two or thereabouts. Four hours are enough for me—and in the summer much less. Sometimes, when the fit is on me, I roam all night long, and come back and do my routine—and then sleep where I am, or may be. Precisians would grow mad at such a life—and yet I'm awfully healthy.”
The stranger watched him. “You live here, then—and so?”
“I have lived here,” said Senhouse, “for three years or more; but I've lived so for over twenty. I've wandered for most of that time, and know England from end to end; but now I seem to have got into a backwater, and I find that I travel farther, and see more, than I did when I was hardly for a week together in the same place. But that's reason-able enough, if you think of it. If you can do with-out time, space goes with it. If it don't matter when you are, it don't matter where.”
The stranger lent this reasoning his gloomy meditation, which turned it inwards to himself and his rueful history. “I don't follow you, I believe,” he said, “for very good reason. I hope you will never learn as I have that it does matter where you are.” He stopped, then added, as if the admission was wrung out of him, “I've been in prison.”