While Bess was speaking I recalled to mind a tale of my grandfather Henry Vavasour, which Mr. Butharwick had told me; how he had left home to wander with the gipsies for some years, a very mad-cap, full of pranks, and returned to his proper station on his father's death. Could it be that the gipsy-girl and I were cousins, and she, perchance, by right the mistress of Temple Belwood? I knew that my likeness to my grandfather had struck some who knew him. Was the old woman not altogether crazy, but only forgetful of the lapse of time? "Suppose your father's fancy should be true, Bess, and you the heiress of some rich man, or noble of the land." Bess laughed. "I give no credent ear to the dream; and if it should come true, the gentile might remain undisturbed for me. I love the tent--even now I choke for air inside cottage walls." "But a mansion, Bess, a house like Temple, say." "So much the more a prison, room within room, and the life a slavery to bells and striking clocks, a dull round of doing the same thing at the same hour. I suffocate to think of it." "There are comforts and conveniencies, Bess." "You think them so because custom makes them necessary. You shut yourselves in a stuffy chamber and heap blankets and sheets on you, for it is bedtime, whether you are drowsy or not; whether the night be dull, or more splendid than the day. To rest, when you are weary, on sweet smelling heather, lulled by the still noises of the night, the wind in the grass, the cries of night-birds, the faint sound of moving water--is not to your liking. How should it be, when you have not tried it? Or to roam, the night through, under a sky shining with stars, when the trees have donned their robes of lovely mist, and the creatures which are afraid of man are abroad, the beasts and birds and creeping and flying things that love the dark, hold stillness of the night; what do you know of this, you who are never out in the dusk, except to kill, or to hurry from this house to that?" "Not so delightsome in midwinter, methinks." "If there is anything on earth more gay and glorious than a ramble by night, when there is a moon, and a nor'west wind blows, bringing snow showers, followed by calm spells, during which the heaven is clear, and the world is wrapped in whiteness and light, I don't know of it." "But do you never wish for some better shelter than the tent on these same winter nights, when the frost bites shrewdly? You cannot always be wandering by moonlight." "Better shelter there is none. You gentiles have coddled yourselves in hot, close rooms, so that the wholesome cold, which should strengthen you, gives you wheezy lungs and rheumatic diseases." "'Tis good hearing that a tent is so healthy, for I shall soon have no better dwelling. Am going for a soldier." "To France?"