“Don’t move! Stay where you are.” She waved the pistol at him, as she saw his hand reach to the mantel.
“I don’t need to move. The globe is here. Allow me.” He turned on the light. In its soft small gleam they regarded each other, and for the first few moments had nothing to say.
Rosamond saw a man who was presumably in his “middle thirties”—a strong, well-built man, with breadth of shoulder and depth of chest, and with face and hands tanned by years of turning them, unprotected, toward all weathers. He had no beard or moustache. His face was lean, and broad at the brow and chin; his eyes large, deep-set, and dark; and his mouth wide—with firmness, humour, and sympathy in the lines about it. His hat was a large battered felt, of weather-stained hue, trimmed with a long, slender feather, dropped on the fields by a pheasant and appropriated by this tramp who had an eye for ornamentation. He wore in his belt a spray of pine, with small cones forming on it. His clothes were brown, rough, and spattered with burrs. The coat—a loose thing, held in by a dark, carved leather belt, must have had half a dozen deep pockets in it. His trouser-legs were rolled up and it was evident that his thick socks and his boots were wet through. His black hair gleamed about his forehead, suggesting that he had had his head, as well as his feet, in the brooks that coursed the fields to spill their crystal into the river. The light was behind him, and she could not see whether his physiognomy bore the marks of a life of crime, as his raiment bore the marks of his profession—a gentleman of the road. Though his speech was peculiar, she noticed, gratefully, that it was clear. While the double pockets on both sides of his coat bulged, their irregular convexity, she saw, was not due to bottles.
In the matter of view, he had the advantage; for the globe sent its rays directly upon her, and she bloomed out of the shadows like some legendary princess arriving from the Kingdom of Nowhere on a shaft of light, wrapped in the silver radiance of the moon and the petals of a rose.
“Why, you are young!” he said at last, in a low tone of such charmed wonder as a wet and burr-bedecked vagabond might naturally feel at the apparition of a fairy princess. “Only a girl. From your voice, so sweet and cold and prim, I judged you to be as old as—as my heart.”
“Rosamond saw a man who was presumably in his ‘middle thirties’—a strong, well-built man, with face and hands tanned by years of turning them, unprotected, toward all weathers”
She was unprepared for this mode of address and did not know how to answer it; but she kept prominently in her mind the rules for dealing with bandits, as she had gathered them from her reading, namely, to avoid angering them unduly, and never to show fear. She waggled the pistol at him and said with dignity:
“You see I am not afraid of you.”
She saw that he smiled.