Morelli led them up the stairs, with a pause every now and again to point out things of interest.
“The house is, you know,” he said almost apologetically, “something of a museum. I have collected a good deal one way and another. Everything has its story.”
Maradick thought, as his host said this, that he must know a great many stories, some of them perhaps scarcely creditable ones. The things that he saw had in his eyes a sinister effect. There could be nothing very pleasant about those leering animals and rustling, whispering skins; it gave the house, too, a stuffy, choked-up air, something a little too full, and full, too, of not quite the pleasantest things.
The staircase was charming. A broad window with diamond-shaped panes faced them as they turned the stair and gave a pleasant, cheerful light to the walls and roof. A silver crescent moon with glittering stars attending it shone at the window against an evening sky of the faintest blue; a glow that belonged to the vanished sun, and was so intangible that it had no definite form of colour, hung in the air and passed through the window down the stairs into the dark recesses of the hall. The walls were painted a dark red that had something very cheerful and homely about it.
Suddenly from the landing above them came voices.
“No, Miss Minns, I’m going to wait. I don’t care; father said he’d be back. Oh! I hear him.”
“Father, do hurry up; Miss Minns is so impatient at having to wait, and I said I wouldn’t begin till you came, and the potatoes are black, black, black.”
Maradick looked up and saw a girl standing at the head of the stairs. In her hand she held a small silver lamp that flung a pale circle of yellow behind and around her; she held it a little above her head in order that she might see who it was that mounted the stairs.
He thought she was the most beautiful girl that he had ever seen; her face was that of a child, and there was still in it a faint look of wonderment and surprise, as though she had very recently broken from some other golden dream and discovered, with a cry, the world.
Her mouth was small, and curved delicately like the petals of a very young rose that turn and open at the first touch of the sun’s glow. Her eyes were so blue that there seemed no end at all to the depth, and one gazed into them as into a well on a night of stars; there were signs and visions in them of so many things that a man might gaze for a year of days and still find secrets hidden there. Her hair was dark gold and was piled high in a great crown, and not so tightly that a few curls did not escape and toss about her ears and over her eyes. She wore a gown of very pale blue that fell in a single piece from her shoulders to her feet; her arms to the elbow and her neck were bare, and her dress was bound at the waist by a broad piece of old gold embroidered cloth.