In reply to his question I was rather evasive, saying that I happened to be in Swanage, and had driven out to pay a complimentary call upon his sister. She was not to put herself out of the way in the least, I urged. I should remain in Swanage for some days and hoped to have the pleasure of calling again. Then turning and glancing around, I exclaimed:--"What a delightful old room! To me it is a real pleasure to enter a thoroughly English home, as this is." "Why?" he inquired, eyeing me with some surprise. "Because I live almost always on the Continent, and after a time foreign life and foreign ways jar upon the Englishman. At least I've found it so." "Ah!" He sighed, rather heavily I thought. "And I, too, have found it so. I quite agree with you. One may travel the world over, as I have done these past twenty years, yet there's no place like our much-abused old England, after all." "Oh, then you've been a rolling stone, like myself," I remarked, delighted at the success of my ruse. "Yes. And I still am," was his answer, given rather sadly. "Ever since my poor wife's death, now nearly twenty years ago, I've been a wanderer. This place is mine, but I'm scarcely ever here. Why? I can't for the life of me tell you. I've tried to settle down, but cannot. After a week here in this quiet rural dulness, the old fever sets up in my blood, a longing for action, a longing to go south to Italy--the country which seems to hold me in a kind of magnetism which I have never been able to resist." "And I, too, love Italy," I said. "Is it not strange that most of us who have lived any length of time in that country of blossoming magnolias and gentle vines always desire to return to it. We may abuse its defects, we may revile its people as dishonest idlers, we may execrate its snail-like railways and run down its primitive hotels, yet all the same we have a secret longing to return to that glowing land where life is love, where art is in the very atmosphere, where the sun brings gladness to the heaviest heart, and the night silence is broken by love _stornelli_ and the mandoline." "You are right," he said, gazing straight out of the old leaded window and speaking almost as though to himself. "Byron found it so, Shelley, Smollet, Trollope, the Brownings and hosts of others. They were fascinated by the fatal beauty of Italy--just as a man is so often drawn to his doom by the face of a beautiful woman. And after all we are but straws on the winds of the hour." Then, turning to a cabinet, I bent and admired a fine old Lowestoft tea-set and a collection of old blue posset-pots, whereupon he said:-- "Ah! I see you are interested in antiques. Do you care for pictures? I have one or two."