watch. ‘The coach should be in soon,’ he said. ‘Let us go forth and await it.’ We went out of the Dolphin together into the hall, and there we came to a halt, for he had [Pg 80]thought upon some new point in his undertaking, and he began to hold forth to me upon that. [Pg 80] I can see the whole place now—the dark oak walls, the dark oak stairs, and my Captain’s blue coat and scarlet face making a brave bit of colour in the sombre place. The Noble Rose is gone long since, but that hall lives in my memory for a thing that just then happened. [Pg 81] [Pg 81] CHAPTER X SHE COMES DOWN THE STAIRS From the hall of the Noble Rose sprang an oak staircase, and at this instant a girl began to descend the stairs. She was quite young—a tall slip of a thing, who scarcely seemed nineteen—and she had hair of a yellow that looked as if it loved the sun, and her eyes were of a softer blue than my friend’s. I knew that at last I looked on Marjorie, Lancelot’s Marjorie, the maid whose very picture had seemed farther from me than the farthest star. Her face was fresh, as of one who has enjoyed liberally the open air, and not sat mewed within four walls like a town miss. I noted, too, that her steps as she came down the stairs were not taken mincingly, as school-girls are wont to walk, but with decision, like a boy. Indeed, though she was a beautiful girl, and soon to make a beautiful woman, there was a quality of manliness in her which pleased me much then and more thereafter. There is a play I have seen acted in which a girl goes to live in a wood in a [Pg 82]man’s habit. I have thought since that she of the play must have showed like this girl, and indeed I speak but what I know when I say that man’s apparel became her bravely. Now, as she came down the stairs she was clad in some kind of flowered gown of blue and white which set off her fair loveliness divinely. She carried some yellow flowers at her girdle; they were Lent lilies,
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