Sweet memory #1 from The Lady and the Minstrel

My hero, Rob, is locked in the dungeon and I’m not going to have time to write him out before Christmas. (My Christmas, not his.) Still, it’s very cold and damp and depressing in there, so I’m granting him 10 sweet memories from earlier chapters of The Lady and the Minstrel. He and I will share one of them with you each day for the next ten days. 

Sweet memory #1, from Chapter 1

This one face had flitted through his memory again and again o’er the course of the last seven years.

 

No, not this face. The face of a ten-year-old girl who had been playing hide-and-seek with her grandfather in the woods on that day when he might have forfeited all for the sake of a book and a lute.

 

And yet, he thought as his lungs expanded to their normal capacity again, he could easily imagine that child growing up to look very like this graceful, diminutive daughter of a baron. In feature she strongly resembled her mother, with the wide eyes that sat beguilingly in her soft, flowerlike countenance, a small, tip-tilted nose lightly brushed with freckles, and lips that blushed a delicate shade of rose. Lovely, but not beautiful, and cast in a darker mode than her mother, her dusky hair billowing like a cloud from the confines of the fur-trimmed hood that had fallen against her shoulders. Yet her countenance held a sweetness that set her strikingly apart from the gilded haired, equally pretty Lady Valette.