she held it back. Then he said: 'It is the custom of the Dale to
all women.'

So she let him kiss her hand, heeding the kiss nothing, and said
soberly:

'Then art thou of Burgdale, and if it were lawful to guess, I would
say that thy name is Face-of-god, of the House of the Face.'

'Even so it is,' said he, 'but in the Dale those that love me do
mostly call me Gold-mane.'

'It is well named,' she said, 'and seldom wilt thou be called
otherwise, for thou wilt be well-beloved. But come in now, Gold-
mane, for night is at hand, and here have we meat and lodging such as
an hungry and weary man may take; though we be broken people,
dwellers in the waste.'

Therewith she led him gently over the threshold into the hall, and it
seemed to him as if she were the fairest and the noblest of all the
Queens of ancient story.

When he was in the house he looked and saw that, rough as it was
without it lacked not fairness within. The floor was of hard-trodden
earth strewn with pine-twigs, and with here and there brown bearskins
laid on it: there was a standing table near the upper end athwart
the hall, and a days beyond that, but no endlong table. Gold-mane
looked to the shut-beds, and saw that they were large and fair,
though there were but a few of them; and at the lower end was a loft
for a sleeping chamber dight very fairly with broidered cloths. The