Her Faithful Knight — page 12: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

8 The Hour and the Woman. She was very beautiful, as he knew she would be, pale and fair, and somewhat thin, but not unhealthy looking; in age, apparently twenty, and in expression, serious and a little sad. Her eyes were gray and luminous, set off by dark lashes and straight, well marked eyebrows; her. fea- tures were delicate and her lips very firmly closed. Light brown hair that only asked for sunlight to shine golden, crowned the pale, pink fairness of her skin; in figure she was rather tall, and larger in the waist than a fashionable dressmaker would have permitted. Her clothes were cheap and plain; shabby and dowdy they might have ap- peared on a less beautiful woman; but in Aylmer Read’s eyes the cestus of Venus could not have more admirably set off her charms. He knew instinctively that she was going to the Mu- seum, and this not by reason of any resemblance between her and the students and readers who had gone before, but because he felt romantically certain that she was des- tined to come under his particular notice, and to play from henceforth an important part in his life. The long look he had taken into her face seemed to him to establish already a relationship between them, al- though she had passed by as though unaware of his pres- ence. A woman so beautiful as she imperatively de- manded a chivalrous protector to follow at a distance and guard her from the undesirable attentions her attractions might provoke in a great city. Already he had forgot- ten the object which brought him to Great Russell street, but he followed the beautiful ill-shod feet across the courtyard and past the dripping, shining pigeons up the steps and into the Museum. Here a check awaited him. The beautiful unknown wrote her name in the students’ book and disappeared to remove her hat. By this time Aylmer recalled the fact that he was a reader and not a student, and that his way COMMIGCLOOKXS (S@)