before. He prided himself on a most unreverential spirit, but
his instant, most unfamiliar emotion was one of reverence. His
fantastic wit idealized wildly enough. "An angel among angels," he
exulted. "Ecce Rosa Mundi," his rusty scholarship trumpeted. His
brain was a tumult of passionate phrases from passionate play-books,
"Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air," overriding them all like
a fairy swan upon a fairy sea. There never was such a woman since the
world began; there never could be such a woman again till the world
should end. And while his mind whirled with his own ecstasies and the
ecstasies of dead players, the Lady Brilliana came slowly down the
great stairs.

If the light of her on his eyes dazzled him, if the riot in his mind
overprized her excellence, a saner man could scarce have failed to be
delighted with the girl's beauty, a wiser to have denied her visible
promises of merit. If better-balanced minds than the mind of Hercules
Halfman, striving to conjure up the image of their dreams, had looked
upon the face, upon the form, of Brilliana Harby, they might well
have been willing to let imagination rest and be contented with the
living flesh. Twenty sweet years of healthy country life had set
their seal of grace and color upon the child of the union of two
noble, sturdy stocks; all that was best of a brave dead man and a
fair dead woman was mirrored in the pride of her face, the candor of
her eyes, the courage of her mouth. Lost father and lost mother had
made a strange pair; all their excellences were summed and multiplied
in their bright child's being. A dozen gallant gentlemen of Oxford or
Warwickshire would have given their fortunes for the smallest
scissors-clipping of one sable curl, would have perilled their lives
for one kind smile of those blue eyes, would have bartered their
scanty chances of salvation for the first kiss of her fresh lips.

While she descended the stairs Halfman never took his eyes off the
lady. He found himself wishing he were a painter, that he might
perpetuate her graces through a few favored generations who might
behold and adore her dimly as he beheld and adored her clearly, in
her riding-dress of Lincoln green, whose voluminous superfluity she
held gathered to her girdle as she moved. No painter could have
scanned her more closely, noted more minutely the buckle of
brilliants that captured the plume in her hat, the lace about her
throat, the curious work upon her l