“This for the deed she did at Ashby Farms,
     Helen of Ormond, Royal Maid-at-Arms!

     “Though for all time the lords of Ormond be
     Butlers to Majesty,
     Yet shall new honors fall upon her
     Who, armored, rode for love to Ashby Farms;
     Let this her title be:  A Maid-at-Arms!

     “Serene mid love’s alarms,
     For all time shall the Maids-at-Arms,
     Wearing the ghost-ring, triumph with their constancy. 
     And sweetly conquer with a sigh
     And vanquish with a tear
     Captains a trembling world might fear.

     “This for the deed she did at Ashby Farms,
     Helen of Ormond, Royal Maid-at-Arms!”

Staring at the picture, lips quivering with the soundless words, such wretched loneliness came over me that a dryness in my throat set me gulping, and I groped my way back to the settle by the fireplace and sat down heavily in homesick solitude.

[Illustration:  “I sat down heavily in homesick solitude".]

Then hate came, a quick hatred for these Northern skies, and these strangers of the North who dared claim kin with me, to lure me northward with false offer of council and mockery of hospitality.

I was on my feet again in a flash, hot with anger, ready with insult to meet insult, for I meant to go ere I had greeted my host—­an insult, indeed, and a deadly one among us.  Furious, I bent to snatch my rifle from the settle where it lay, and, as I flung it to my shoulder, wheeling to go, my eyes fell upon a figure stealing down the stairway from above, a woman in flowered silk, bare of throat and elbow, fingers scarcely touching the banisters as she moved.

She hesitated, one foot poised for the step below; then it fell noiselessly, and she stood before me.

Anger died out under the level beauty of her gaze.  I bowed, just as I caught a trace of mockery in the mouth’s scarlet curve, and bowed the lower for it, too, straightening slowly to the dignity her mischievous eyes seemed to flout; and her lips, too, defied me, all silently—­nay, in every limb and from every finger-tip she seemed to flout me, and the slow, deep courtesy she made me was too slow and far too low, and her recovery a marvel of plastic malice.

“My cousin Ormond?” she lisped;—­“I am Dorothy Varick.”

We measured each other for a moment in silence.

There was a trace of powder on her bright hair, like a mist of snow on gold; her gown’s yoke was torn, for all its richness, and a wisp of lace in rags fell, clouding the delicate half-sleeve of China silk.

Her face, colored like palest ivory with rose, was no doll’s face, for all its symmetry and a forgotten patch to balance the dimple in her rounded chin; it was even noble in a sense, and, if too chaste for sensuous beauty, yet touched with a strange and pensive sweetness, like ’witched marble waking into flesh.