"Silly, old-fashioned things!" said the woman. "But mebbe I have one that I wore whilst Brundage was courtin'."
"And a plain blouse?" Dick continued. "And perhaps a darker skirt——"
"And hair in a plait down her back," cried the woman, greeting with a chuckle her first game of make-believe for many a long year; "your nobleman might pass his daughter twenty times like that, an' never would 'e know 'er."
CHAPTER XVI.
"THE GOAT IN BOOTS."
It was almost noon of Saturday, June the twenty-first, when a party of three halted in the shade of a few stunted hawthorns by the side of the sandy, half-made road which leads from Margetstowe village to the turnpike, which, branching from the main London Road fifteen miles to the south-west, runs north-eastward through Ecclesthorpe-on-the-Moor to the sea at the mouth of the great estuary.
From this tree-clump could be seen, facing the junction of the sandy road with the metalled, the front and the swinging signboard of "The Goat in Boots." And here, that its two more ordinary-looking members might shed the oddity which they owed to the company of the third, the party was to separate.
For in Amaryllis, sleep, Dick's care and Mrs. Brundage's wardrobe had worked transformation. From the dust and mud on the thick little shoes, up over five visible inches of coarse grey stocking to clumsy amplitude of washed-out, pink-striped cotton skirt, and thence by severity of blue-linen blouse to the face lurking in the pale lavender of the quilted sun-bonnet, the eye met nothing which was not proper to the country-girl, dressed a little older, when the tail of hair swung to her body's movement, than her sixteen years required.
If the face was not so ruddy as a moorland girl's should be, and if the mark of the "smutty finger" beneath each eye suggested, out of Ireland, ill health—well, sickness and recovery are not restricted to the town, and the bright eyes, when the lids would lift, gave promise of returning health.