“The old fellow with the bandy legs, and the head that lolled to and fro when he walked. It was just here I played that trick on him. You were standing there—by the door; I was behind a bush with the squirt. I can see you laughing now, and the flick of your green skirt as you bolted into the yew alley.”
She smiled, but her face grew grave again abruptly, as though reproved by some power within.
“How long ago it seems! We have changed so much! And you have been nearly over the whole world!”
He glanced at her as she spoke, finding by instinct in her a sense of something to be overcome. It might be the natural strength of reserve in her. Yet she appeared to him like a girl brought up in some fanatical home where laughter was a sign of carnal inclinations. Her heart might begin to smile, but some habit of self-repression stifled the impulse before it could mature.
“You will tell me about your voyages?”
“If they are of any interest to you.”
Her eyes met his, and then swerved away with a flash of wayward feeling that puzzled him.
“I should like to hear everything. It has an interest for me. And then—you were in a Moorish prison?”
He looked into the distance with the air of a man ready to speak of his very self.
“Prison. That is an experience that grinds the folly out of the heart. A man is walled up with that strange riddle of a thing—himself. It made me learn to understand those old hermits in the deserts. For the devils who tempted them, and whom they fought and cast out into the night, were the devils a man carried about with him in his own heart. Prison makes a man a wild beast—or a philosopher.”