They ran up to their rooms to dress, talking and laughing.  They could not be silent, their hearts were so light.  Jean sang softly to herself as she laid out what she meant to wear that evening.  Pamela had made her promise to wear a white frock, the merest wisp of a frock made of lace and georgette, with a touch of vivid green, and a wreath of green leaves for the golden-brown head.  Jean had protested.  She was afraid she would look overdressed:  a black frock would be more suitable; but Pamela had insisted and Jean had promised.

As she looked in the glass she smiled at the picture she made.  It was a pity Pamela couldn’t see how successful the frock was, for she had designed it....  Lord Bidborough had never seen her prettily dressed.  Why did Pamela never mention him?  Jean realised the truth of the old saying, “Speak weel o’ ma love, speak ill o’ ma love, but aye speak o’ him.”

She looked into the boys’ room when she was ready and found them only half dressed and engaged in a game of cock-fighting.  Having admonished them she went down alone.  She went very slowly down the last flight of stairs (she was shy of going into the dining-room)—­a slip of a girl crowned with green leaves.  Suddenly she stopped.  There, in the hall watching her, alone but for the “boots” with the wrinkled, humorous face and eyes of amused tolerance, was Richard Plantagenet.

Behind her where she stood hung a print of Lear—­the hovel on the heath, the storm-bent trees, the figure of the old man, the shivering Fool with his “Poor Tom’s a-cold.”  Beside her, fastened to the wall, was a letter-box with a glass front full of letters and picture-cards waiting to be taken to the evening post.  Tragedy and the commonplace things of life—­but Jean, for the moment, was lifted far from either.  She was seeing a new heaven and a new earth.  Words were not needed.  She looked into Richard Plantagenet’s eyes and knew that he wanted her, and she put her hands out to him like a trusting child.

* * * * *

When Jock and Mhor reached the dining-room and found Richard Plantagenet seated beside Jean they were rapturous in their greetings, pouring questions on him, demanding to know how long he meant to stay.

“As long as you stay,” he told them.

“Oh, good,” Jock said.  “Are you fearfully keen on Shakespeare?  Jean’s something awful.  It gives me a sort of hate at him to hear her.”

“Oh, Jock,” Jean protested, “surely not.  I’m not nearly as bad as some of the people here.  I don’t haver quite so much....  I was in the drawing-room this morning and heard two women talking, an English woman and an American.  The English woman remarked casually that Shakespeare wasn’t a Christian, and the American protested, ’Oh, don’t say.  He had a great White Soul.’”

“Gosh, Maggie!” said Jock.  “What a beastly thing to say about anybody!  If Shakespeare could see Stratford now I expect he’d laugh—­all the shops full of little heads, and pictures of his house, and models of his birthplace ... it’s enough to put anybody off being a genius.”