He shifted the chair impatiently and she forestalled his reply.
"I suppose," she said, "that some buy their freedom in the course of years with the big price of experience, but others are born free. If you have not bought yours yet you will some day. But I was born free. Peter, too, I think. He has the courage of his beliefs; he is no captive to past customs, nor is the fear of the neighbour the beginning of his wisdom. If we walk into cages it will be of our own free will, and not because any stale bait can tempt us from within, nor any pursuing hounds scare us from without."
"Ferlie," said the bewildered man beside her, "will you please tell me exactly what you mean?"
She shook a tangled lock out of her eyes and, at that moment, in the gilding firelight, he had an odd fancy that a man might fill his hands with sovereigns who had the courage to plunge them into her hair. Involuntarily, he touched the ruffled rebellious head.
"You and I have always understood one another," he reminded her.
She imprisoned his fingers between her two soft palms.
"It is a good many years now, Cyprian, since you and I became friends. Whenever I have had need of you and you could possibly reach me, you have always come. We have had to face separation for what has seemed a vitally long time to me since your last leave. To you, already mentally settled and developed, it may not have seemed so long. But I have been half afraid that your return would separate us more surely than, so far, has the sea. To test that fear, I came to-night, because I have need of you, Cyprian. To-night, not to-morrow. When I was little, what help could you have given me by waiting for the daylight? I used to think you could save me from the tomb which was all ready to close on me. Now it is a cage of which I am afraid. I want to stay with you until that fear is past. I want to assure myself of you; to re-learn you in the light of my increased knowledge of life. To-night, not to-morrow. For to-morrow I have to make a decision concerning that cage, and the decision depends upon what I may learn of you in the little time we have together to-night. I knew how you would shrink from offending Convention; therefore I have frustrated Convention. We have only a few more free hours in which to pick up the threads which may have got dropped and twisted. Upon the untangling of them rests my decision of to-morrow. I have gone to sleep in your arms so often that it is a very natural thing for me to remain beside you now until we can both sleep—at rest, in one another's presence again. I need you, Cyprian, just now. And I want you to realize just how much, or how little, you need me."
All but mesmerized, he listened. That which was hide-bound in him, and entirely reticent British, put up a dull fight against the naked simplicity of her words. He said weakly: "Dear, you are so young. You do not understand."
"I understand 'What a Young Girl Ought to Know,'" and she bubbled over with quick mockery. "Curiously enough, the knowledge neither distresses nor shames me. This isn't the Victorian era. But all that I understand, or misunderstand, about the threadbare 'Facts of Life,' affects neither of us with regard to this situation. We have cherished our hours in the past, scattered here and there, each like a desert oasis. We have come to another now. Later, very much later, I think I shall probably fall asleep in this chair and then you may cover me up and depart in peace, yourself, to bed. And to-morrow we can breakfast somewhere together as if I had just come upon the morning train and you had met me, and no one need hear that we spent a happy night, or thereabouts, re-discovering one another."
Stirred to the depths and vexed with himself for his susceptibility to her moods, Cyprian withdrew his hand into safety.