Maid Marian and Other Stories

MAID MARIAN.

Yes, it was surely the embodiment of feminine beauty—the dark, narrow-lidded eyes, wide apart—did you ever notice the terrible intelligence in the eyes of a portrait?—the slim patrician nose, the hair so quaintly coifed with pearl, the uplifted hand: no wonder that Macfarren gazed at it with something like reverence. You will be apt to imagine that Macfarren was an enthusiast, possibly with darkly curling hair and of a Byronic-Dantesque cast of countenance. Quite the contrary. He was a keen-witted, hard-headed New York lawyer fast galloping out of his forties—a well-made, well-dressed man, with a clear-cut, sensible face. His hair had been trifled with by the hand of Time, and what remained is not worth describing.

Nor was the place sanctified by the lady Marian's portrait a Norman abbey, nor yet a battlemented castle. It was a room sliced off from the place where the housemaids kept their brooms and dust-pans on the third floor of a New York hotel. Macfarren had kept those rooms for twenty years. Meanwhile, bachelors' flats had sprung up all over town, but he was conservative and kept


 his modest suite of two rooms until the advent of the Lady Marian made another room a necessity. For the portrait was so large—a full-length—and so conspicuous that it would have monopolized the whole of the cosey sitting-room. Besides, Macfarren had a—superstition, perhaps—something about the portrait which made him shrink from exposing it to the vulgar gaze of the waiters and bell-boys who saw the inside of his room, and the jokes—how he would have chafed under them!—of the good fellows who came in occasionally for a quiet smoke and chat……………….