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 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, as I believe.
This apparition distracting my attention from the Captain’s words, he wheeled round upon his heel and learnt the cause of my inattention. Immediately he smiled and called to the maiden.
‘Come here, niece; I have found you a new friend.’
She came forward, smiling to him, and then looked at me with an expression of the sweetest gravity in the world. Surely there never was such a girl in the world since the sun first shone on maidens.
‘Lass,’ said the Captain, ‘this is our new friend. His name is Raphael Crowninshield, but, because I think he has more of the man in him than of the archangel, I mean to call him Ralph.’
The girl held out her hand to me in a way that reminded me much of Lancelot.
As I took her hand I felt that my face was flaming like the sun in a sea-fog—no less round and no less red. I was timid with girls, for I knew but few, and after my misfortune I had shunned those few most carefully. She was not shy herself, though, and she did not seem to note my shyness—or, if she did, it gave her no pleasure to note it, as it would have given many less gracious maidens. Her hand was not very small, but it was finely fashioned—a noble hand, like my Captain’s and like Lancelot’s; a hand that gave a true grasp; a hand that it was a pleasure to hold.
‘Shall I call you Ralph or Raphael?’ she said.