Wogan had spun his tale out, but half an hour enclosed it, from the beginning to the end.  He became silent again; but he was aware at once that silence was more dangerous than speech, for in the silence he could hear both their hearts speaking.  He began hurriedly to talk of their journey, and there could be no more insidious topic for him to light upon.  For he spoke of the Road, and he had already been given a warning that to the romance of the Road her heart turned like a compass-needle to the north.  They were both gipsies, for all that they had no Egyptian blood.  That southward road from Innspruck was much more than a mere highway of travel between a starting-place and a goal, even to these two to whom the starting-place meant peril and the goal the first opportunity of sleep.

“Even in our short journey,” said Clementina, “how it climbed hillsides angle upon angle, how it swept through the high solitudes of ice where no trees grow, where silence lives; how it dropped down into green valleys and the noise of streams!  And it still sweeps on, through dark and light, a glimmer at night, a glare in the midday, between lines of poplars, hidden amongst vines, through lighted cities, down to Venice and the sea.  If one could travel it, never retracing a step, pitching a tent by the roadside when one willed!  That were freedom!” She stopped with a remarkable abruptness.  She turned her eyes out of the window for a little.  Then again she asked,—­

“How long till morning?”

“But one more hour.”

She came back into the room and seated herself at the table.

“You gave me some hint at Innspruck of an adventurous ride from Ohlau,” and she drew her breath sharply at the word, as though the name with all its associations struck her a blow, “into Strasbourg.  Tell me its history.  So will this hour pass.”

He told her as he walked about the room, though his heart was not in the telling, nor hers in the hearing, until he came to relate the story of his escape from the inn a mile or so beyond Stuttgart.  He described how he hid in the garden, how he crossed the rich level of lawn to the lighted window, how to his surprise he was admitted without a question by an old bookish gentleman—­and thereupon he ceased so suddenly that Clementina turned her head aside and listened.

“Did you hear a step?” she asked in a low voice.

“No.”

And they both listened.  No noise came to their ears but the brawling of the torrent.  That, however, filled the room, drowning all the natural murmurs of the night.

“Indeed, one would not hear a company of soldiers,” said Clementina.  She crossed to the window.

“Yet you heard my step, and it waked you,” said Wogan, as he followed her.

“I listened for it in my sleep,” said she.

For a second time that night they stood side by side looking upon darkness and the spangled sky.  Only there was no courtyard with its signs of habitation.  Clementina drew herself away suddenly from the sill.  Wogan at once copied her example.