Ailsa Paige by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
page 47 of 544 (08%)
page 47 of 544 (08%)
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They both laughed softly, looking at each other in the mirror. So, in her gown of rosy muslin, bouffant and billowy, a pink flower in her hair, and Celia's pink-and-white cameo at her whiter throat Ailsa Paige descended the carpeted stairs and came into the mellow dimness of the front parlour, where there was much rosewood, and a French carpet, and glinting prisms on the chandeliers,--and a young man, standing, dark against a bar of sunshine in which golden motes swam. "How do you do," she said, offering her narrow hand, and: "Mrs. Craig is dressing to receive you. . . . It is warm for April, I think. How amiable of you to come all the way over from New York. Mr. Craig and his son Stephen are at business, my cousins, Paige and Marye, are at school. Won't you sit down?" She had backed away a little distance from him, looking at him under brows bent slightly inward, and thinking that she had made no mistake in her memory of this man. Certainly his features were altogether too regular, his head and body too perfectly moulded into that dark and graceful symmetry which she had hitherto vaguely associated with things purely and mythologically Olympian. Upright against the doorway, she suddenly recollected with a blush that she was staring like a schoolgirl, and sat down. And he drew up a chair before her and seated himself; and then under the billowy rose crinoline she set her pretty feet close together, folded her hands, and looked at him with a smiling composure which she no longer really felt. |
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