lgo scores; intelligible to this dame and her daughter, who
wrote them at need by simply mounting a low stool, and scratching with
a knife so as to show lines of ceiling through the deposit of smoke. The
dame explained that the writing on the wall was put there to frighten
moneyless folk from the inn altogether, or to be acted on at odd times
when a non-paying face should come in and insist on being served. "We
can't refuse them plump, you know. The law forbids us."

"And how know you mine is not such a face?"

"Out fie! it is the best face that has entered 'The Three Fish' this
autumn."

"And mine, dame?" said Denys; "dost see no knavery here?"

She eyed him calmly. "Not such a good one as the lad's; nor ever will
be. But it is the face of a true man. For all that," added she drily,
"an I were ten years younger, I'd as lieve not meet that face on a dark
night too far from home."

Gerard stared. Denys laughed. "Why, dame, I would but sip the night dew
off the flower; and you needn't take ten years off, nor ten days, to be
worth risking a scratched face for."

"There, our mistress," said Marion, who had just come in, "said I not
t'other day you could make a fool of them still, an if you were properly
minded?"

"I dare say ye did; it sounds like some daft wench's speech."

"Dame," said Gerard, "this is wonderful."

"What? Oh! no, no, that is no wonder at all. Why, I have been here all
my life; and reading faces is the first thing a girl picks up in an
inn."

Marion. "And frying eggs the second; no, telling lies; frying eggs is
the third, though."

The Mistress. "And holding her tongue the last, and modesty the day
after never at all."

Marion. "Alack! Talk of my tongue. But I say no more. She under whose
wing I live now deals the blow. I'm sped--'tis but a chambermaid gone.
Catch what's left on't!" and she staggered and sank backwards on to the
handsomest fellow in the room, which happened to be Gerard.

"Tic! tic!" cried he peevishly; "there, don't be stupid! that is too
heavy a jest for me. See you not I am talking to the mistress?"

Marion resumed her elasticity with a grimace, made two little bounds
into the middle of the floor, and there turned a pirouette. "There,
mistress," said she, "I give in; 'tis you that reigns supreme with the
men, leastways with male children."

"Young man," said the mistress, "this girl is not so stupid as her
deportment; in reading of faces, and frying of omelets, there