t needed neither sun nor dew to make it
glow. All these could be seen in different lights upon her heavy hair,
which when unbound hung as low as her knees. Her thick brows were dark
gold, and her fearless eyes dark gray with gold gleams in them. They
may have been reflections from her lashes, or even from her skin, which
had upon it the bloom of a golden plum. Dim ages since her fathers had
been kings in Sussex; gradually their estate had diminished, but with
the lessening of their worldly possessions they burnished the brighter
the possession of their honor, and bred the care of it in their
children jealously. So it came to pass that Rosalind, who possessed
less than any serf or yeoman in the countryside, trod among these as
though she were a queen, dreaming of a degree which she had never
known, ignored or shrugged at by those whom she accounted her equals,
insulted or gibed at by those she thought her inferiors. For the
dwellers in the neighboring hamlets, to whom the story of her fathers'
fathers was only a legend, saw in her just a shabby girl, less worthy
than themselves because much poorer, whose pride and very beauty
aroused their mockery and wrath. They did not dispute her possession of
the castle. For what to them were four vast roofless walls, enclosing a
square of greensward underfoot and another of blue air overhead, and
pierced with doorless doorways and windowless casements that let in all
the lights of all the quarters of the sky? What to them were these
traces of old chambers etched on the surface of the old gray stone,
these fragments of lovely arches that were but channels for the winds?
In the thick of the great towered gateway one little room remained
above the arch, and here the maiden slept. And all her company was the
ghosts of her race. She saw them feasting in the halls of the air, and
moving on the courtyard of the grass. At night in the galleries of the
stars she heard their singing; and often, looking through the empty
windows over the flats to which the great west wall dropped down, she
saw them ride in cavalcade out of the sunset, from battle or hunt or
tourney. But the peasants, who did not know what she saw and heard,
preferred their snug squalor to this shivering nobility, and despised
the girl who, in a fallen fortress, defended her life from theirs.

At first she had kept her distance with a kind of graciousness, but one
day in her sixteenth year a certain boor met her under the castle