I smiled, and closed my eyes again. It was a most endearing thought, the thought of that brotherly haunting, while I had been bemoaning my abandonment by all the world. There was still that in me, then, to attract admiration, to ensure my affinity with the strong and shapely. I was sick to death of malformations, mental and bodily. What had become of him? I had not reached the end of my resentment, but I did not wish him to think it insurmountable; and I was certainly curious to learn how far my romantic memory of him was justified. And, in the meantime, where was I? in what remote eyrie of the green forest? For all I could see, I might be imprisoned in a well. I rose, and, after making my toilette, had paused undecided, wondering what was to come next, when I heard his voice, very mock-humble, at the trap-- “Little sister, will you come down to breakfast?” The blood thrilled in my temples, but I hardened my heart, and answered “Yes,” as frigid as a nun. He flung up the hatch at once, and for the first time I saw the ladder going down into candlelight, whence a smell of warm dust and tallow rose to my nostrils. He descended before me, and I followed, into the leanest of little cellars, with a rough board on trestles in it and a stool or two. The rafters were hung with cobwebs; there were a couple of dismal dips in horn sconces on the walls; a closed door showed dimly at the farther end, and that was all. I turned in amazement upon my companion, to find him regarding me with a curious expression. But it sobered at once before my gaze. It was not, indeed, now I came to con him, quite the expression of my memory. The sweet humour of it had fallen, I could have thought, upon more mocking times. There was a look in his face as if he had got to love himself the better, the worse he had been depreciated by others; as if injustice had somewhat crooked the old lines of chivalry. But for the rest, he was as bronzed and comely as ever, as lithe and muscular; and the common woodman’s dress (coarse grogram jacket and leggings to the hips), which, whether for convenience or disguise, he had adopted, showed off his fine figure to perfection. “Where is it, the breakfast?” I asked. “Cooking, by Portlock,” said he. “I’m waiting to pull it through.” He stood stooping, indeed, and holding a string in his hand, by what looked like a black gap at the foot of the wall beyond the table. “To pull it through!” I cried out. “Are we to eat it here?” He turned his head, as he leaned, to scan me. “We can take it up under the skylight, if you like,” said he. “My room!” A violent retort was on my lips; but something in his face warned me, and it died unuttered. For all his affected humility, there was a masterfulness here I had not guessed. I realised on the instant that I did not know, had never known him. It was not altogether a disagreeable awakening. I sat down, silent, on one of the stools; and he addressed me again quietly from his place--