ile 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 considerate peremptoriness that she and
her mother had better take their own suppers if