“You must not faint once more,” he cried, anxiously; “you cannot, you know.”
Something like physical despair swept over him as he felt her tremble and sway again.
“What can I do?” he cried, shaking her very hard indeed, “we are far from all. I cannot leave you to get a carriage, I cannot take you—”
“I don’t care what you do,” she murmured, with the usual complete resignation of the swooning, always so exasperating to those who care for them. He felt desperately that she was telling the truth.
There was a sound in the wilderness beyond, a sound that thrilled him with hope and fear at the same instant. The developments of a sound may under some circumstances prove one’s salvation or destruction. He riveted his eyes anxiously in the direction from whence the echo of a horse’s feet splashing through the mud was now drawing nearer each second.
“If it prove the Prinz Regent himself,” he said decidedly, “he must take us in.”
It proved to be, not a royal coach, but a mere ordinary cab, than which nothing more welcome had ever crossed his vision in all his life before. He hailed the cabman, and the cabman stopped in the greatest possible astonishment, and was good enough to descend in the mud and open the door. He asked no questions—cabmen never do—but took the address, mounted to his seat, and put his horse to a rounder trot in the direction of the city.
Rosina leaned back in her corner and shook as if she had the ague. Her hands and feet were icy cold; Von Ibn took her hands in his and feared that she was ill, or going to be so.
“What did make you like that?” he asked, as the wheels dashed the mud-spatters up against the windows; “was it that I distress you, yes?”
“Yes,” she sighed.