Chapter 7 - Page 2

mistress of the
house, however, was an easy woman to strangers, and she made
no objection. Thereupon Elizabeth, being instructed by nods
and motions from the taciturn landlord as to where she could
find the different things, trotted up and down stairs with
materials for her own and her parent's meal.

While she was doing this the wood partition in the centre of
the house thrilled to its centre with the tugging of a bell-
pull upstairs. A bell below tinkled a note that was feebler
in sound than the twanging of wires and cranks that had
produced it.

"'Tis the Scotch gentleman," said the landlady omnisciently;
and turning her eyes to Elizabeth, "Now then, can you go and
see if his supper is on the tray? If it is you can take it
up to him. The front room over this."

Elizabeth-Jane, though hungry, willingly postponed serving
herself awhile, and applied to the cook in the kitchen
whence she brought forth the tray of supper viands, and
proceeded with it upstairs to the apartment indicated. The
accommodation of the Three Mariners was far from spacious,
despite the fair area of ground it covered. The room
demanded by intrusive beams and rafters, partitions,
passages, staircases, disused ovens, settles, and four-
posters, left comparatively small quarters for human beings.
Moreover, this being at a time before home-brewing was
abandoned by the smaller victuallers, and a house in which
the twelve-bushel strength was still religiously adhered to
by the landlord in his ale, the quality of the liquor was
the chief attraction of the premises, so that everything had
to make way for utensils and operations in connection
therewith. Thus Elizabeth found that the Scotchman was
located in a room quite close to the small one that had been
allotted to herself and her mother.

When she entered nobody was present but the young man
himself--the same whom she had seen lingering without the
windows of the King's Arms Hotel. He was now idly reading a
copy of the local paper, and was hardly conscious of her
entry, so that she looked at him quite coolly, and saw how
his forehead shone where the light caught it, and how nicely
his hair was cut, and the sort of velvet-pile or down that
was on the skin at the back of his neck, and how his cheek
was so truly curved as to be part of a globe, and how
clearly drawn were the lids and lashes which hid his bent
eyes.

She set down the tray, spread his supper, and went away
without a word. On her arrival below the landlady, who was
as kind as she was fat and lazy, saw that Elizabeth-Jane was
rather tired, though in her earnestness to be useful she was
waiving her own needs altogether. Mrs. Stannidge thereupon
said with a