Fanny had a long conversation with this lady, and she brought back a bundle of books. The light might have been seen that night, and many nights after, burning long and late from her little window. And having recovered her old freedom of habits, which Simon, poor man, did not notice, and which Sarah, thinking that anything was better than moping at home, did not remonstrate against, Fanny went out regularly for two hours, or sometimes for even a longer period, every evening after old Simon had composed himself to the nap that filled up the interval between dinner and tea. In a very short time--a time that with ordinary stimulants would have seemed marvellously short--Fanny's handwriting was not the same thing; her manner of talking became different; she no longer called herself "Fanny" when she spoke; the music of her voice was more quiet and settled; her sweet expression of face was more thoughtful; the eyes seemed to have deepened in their very colour; she was no longer heard chaunting to herself as she tripped along. The books that she nightly fed on had passed into her mind; the poetry that had ever unconsciously sported round her young years began now to create poetry in herself. Nay, it might almost have seemed as if that restless disorder of the intellect, which the dullards had called Idiotcy, had been the wild efforts, not of Folly, but of GENIUS seeking to find its path and outlet from the cold and dreary solitude to which the circumstances of her early life had compelled it. Days, even weeks, passed--she never spoke of Vaudemont. And once, when Sarah, astonished and bewildered by the change in her young mistress, asked: "When does the gentleman come back?" Fanny answered, with a mysterious smile, "Not yet, I hope,--not quite yet!" CHAPTER IX. "Thierry. I do begin To feel an alteration in my nature, And in his full-sailed confidence a shower Of gentle rain, that falling on the fire Hath quenched it. How is my heart divided Between the duty of a son and love!" BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER: _Thierry and Theodorat_.