'She has such kindly eyes!' Lotty answered. Then she guided Antony up to the long, low hut on the cliff.
The girl simply lifted the latch and entered without ceremony. A peat-fire was burning on a rude stone hearth, and near it sat Crona, warming her skinny hands. A tame fox by her side yapped and howled, and a huge cat put up her back. Crona closed the big Bible she had been reading, and laid it reverently on the window-sill, with her spectacles above it.
'Oh, come your ways in, my bonny Lotty. But wha have you wi' ye? In sooth, a bonny callant. And, oh me, Lotty, there is something tells your old mammy this night o' nights that this callant, this bonny English callant, will'——
She stopped suddenly.
'Forgive an old woman, sir,' she said to Antony, 'who is well-nigh in her dotage.'
She hastily dusted a chair with her apron, and signed to Antony to sit down.
The fire threw out a cheerful blaze, quite dimming the light of the wee oil lamp that hung against the whitewashed wall.
Not very many miles from this same pine-wood is the 'blasted heath' of Shakespeare; and this old woman, Crona, but for the look of kindness in her eyes, might well have represented one of the witches in Macbeth. A witch? Nay; but despite her high cheek-bones and wrinkled face, despite the gray and elfin locks that escaped from beneath her white 'mutch' or cap, let us rather call her 'wise woman,' for witches—if there be any such creatures—never read the Book of Books.
Any age 'twixt seventy and ninety Crona might have been, or even more than that; but Antony could not help noticing that she herself and all her surroundings were wonderfully clean, the fireside tidy, and the delf that stood on shelves or in cupboards shining and spotless. Her clothing, moreover, was immaculate; and Antony, though a mere man, saw that some of her garments were silk and almost new, so that they could not have been cast-offs or misfits from the gentry in the neighbourhood. Indeed, old though she was, she looked aristocratic enough to have repelled any well-meant offers of charity.
But humble though the abode, there were several strange, richly inlaid chests in it, and a cupboard or two in the antique that certainly would have been valuable to the connoisseur.