Then I told her how I had crept out of bed and out of doors in the middle of the night to visit the summer-house. “What a little beast I was,” she said. “I’m always being a little beast, Dante. That’s the way I’m made. Can’t help it. But I’ll never be like that to you again.” By the time we got to Sandford it was night. Lamps in the inn were lighted, shining through the trees across the river. We had dinner in the room next to the bar, in an atmosphere of beer and sawdust and tobacco. The windows were open; the singing of water across the weir was accompaniment to our conversation. She told me the beginning of many things about herself with a strange mixture of frankness and restraint. She spoke of the early days in Italy before her parents died, and of the ordered quiet of her convent life at Tours. After her expulsion from the Red House she had returned to France, and fallen in with the artistic set that had been her father’s in Paris. Her guardian, an old actor, had persuaded her to train for the stage. For a time she had succeeded, but had dropped her profession to go traveling. “I’m an amateur at living,” she told me; “I’m always chopping and changing. I’ll find what I want some day.” Her restlessness had carried her into many strange places. Northern Africa was known to her; she had been through India and Persia. Speaking in her lazy voice, with the faintest trace of a foreign accent, she painted pictures of sun-baked deserts with caravans of nodding camels; of decayed, oriental cities sprawled out like bleached bones in palm-groves beside some ancient river-bank; of strange fierce rituals in musty temples, demanding the blood-sacrifice. She made me feel while she spoke how narrowly I had lived my life. Like a fly on a window-pane I had crawled back and forth, back and forth, viewing the adventure of the great outside, rebellious at restraint, but never taking any rational measures for escape. The river droned across the weir. In the bar-room next door glasses clinked; yokels’ voices rose and fell hoarsely in argument. Fiesole came to a halt and leant back in her chair, gazing searchingly into my face across the table. “You look queer, Dante. What’s the matter?” I laughed shortly. “You’ve been putting the telescope to my eye. You’ve been making me see things largely. How was it that you broke loose that way?” “I had a horror of growing stodgy. I was born to be a South Sea Islander and to run about naked in the sunshine.” “How long are you to be in Oxford?” “Don’t know. I’ve made no plans. I hadn’t expected to spend more than one night. But now----” She did not finish the sentence. We rose from the table. In the porch we loitered, breathing in the deep, cool stillness. “You’ll stay a little while, won’t you, Fiesole?” She took my arm and smiled. “Of course--if you want me.” Going down through the arbors, we stepped into the punt. The river was a-silver with moonlight. CHAPTER XI--SPRING WEATHER