“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.” “More often a beast, Jack,” said my lord, who appeared at the gate leading into the yew walk, fanning himself with a big fan that he had borrowed from Anne Purcell. XIII On the evening of the third day at my Lord Gore’s house at Bushy, Barbara walked alone in the yew alley on the north of the great garden. It was like some dim cloister built for those who fled from the fever of life to cool their hearts in Gothic mysteries. The dark trunks broke, sheaf by sheaf, into groins that crossed in a thousand arches. Its shadowy atmosphere seemed silent and remote, full of an absorbed sadness that spoke of sanctuary. On the tennis-court beyond the house Stephen Gore and his friends were playing out a match that had been put up for a wager. The women-folk were looking on, ready to hazard a brooch or a scarf on the fortunes of a racquet. Barbara, whose heart was full of a fierce unrest, had slipped away alone into the garden, and even if her mother had missed her, she had pinned a sentimental meaning to her daughter’s mood. The sun sank low in the west as Barbara walked in the alley of yews, so low that the western arch of the cloister was a panel of ruddy gold. The long shafts of the decline came streaming through and through the criss-cross boughs, splashing the trunks with amber, and weaving a checker of light and shadow upon the path. There was no sound to break the silence save the occasional plash of oars upon the river and the faint voices from the tennis-court beyond the house.