His hands were small and delicate, with large blue veins, that spoke of relaxed fibres; but their natural whiteness was smudged with smoke-stains, and his beard--a masculine ornament utterly out of fashion among the younger race in King Edward's reign, but when worn by the elder gentry carefully trimmed and perfumed--was dishevelled into all the spiral and tangled curls displayed in the sculptured head of some old Grecian sage or poet.
On the other side of the bed knelt a young girl of about sixteen, with a face exquisitely lovely in its delicacy and expression.

She seemed about the middle stature, and her arms and neck, as displayed by the close-fitting vest, had already the smooth and rounded contour of dawning womanhood, while the face had still the softness, innocence, and inexpressible bloom of a child.

There was a strong likeness between her and her father (for such the relationship, despite the difference of sex and years),--the same beautiful form of lip and brow, the same rare colour of the eyes, dark-blue, with black fringing lashes; and perhaps the common expression, at that moment, of gentle pity and benevolent anxiety contributed to render the resemblance stronger.
"Father, he sinks again!" said the girl.
"Sibyll," answered the man, putting his finger upon a line in a manuscript book that he held, "the authority saith, that a patient so contused should lose blood, and then the arm must be tightly bandaged.
Verily we lack the wherewithal." "Not so, Father!" said the girl, and blushing, she turned aside, and took off the partelet of lawn, upon which holiday finery her young eyes perhaps that morning had turned with pleasure, and white as snow was the neck which was thus displayed; "this will suffice to bind his arm." "But the book," said the father, in great perplexity--"the book telleth us not how the lancet should be applied.

It is easy to say, 'Do this and do that;' but to do it once, it should have been done before.

This is not among my experiments." Luckily, perhaps, for Marmaduke, at this moment there entered an old woman, the solitary servant of the house, whose life, in those warlike times, had made her pretty well acquainted with the simpler modes of dealing with a wounded arm and a broken head.