"We are cousins," she suggested demurely.
"At your service."
"Then I pray you help me to get up."
Had Ronnay de Maurel been asked to hoist up on his shoulder a cannon which weighed a couple of tons, he would have felt less puzzled how to proceed than he did now, when an exquisite thing which looked as if it might break at the slightest touch asked him to help her to raise herself from the ground.
He was, as usual, dressed in blouse and rough breeches. He had no cap on his head, and his feet were encased in heavy riding-boots. For a second or two he looked round him with pathetic helplessness, as if he expected the dwellers of the forest to come to his aid in this awful dilemma. But no one came, and the lovely creature, whose tiny bare foot looked like an exquisite flower, was appealing—oh, so piteously, for help!
"Alas, Monsieur!" she said, "an you'll not come to my assistance, I shall have to wait till some chance passer-by prove more full of pity than you. It is six kilomètres from here to the Château of Courson and I am breakfastless."
Her voice—the tone of which appeared to Ronnay de Maurel like the singing of a nightingale—broke in her plucky effort to keep back the tears of mortification and of pain. He suddenly felt like a brute to stand by and see her suffer so.
"I wish I could help you, Mademoiselle," he said tentatively, "but I am so clumsy, so rough. I should spoil your gown and...."
"Eh, mon cousin," she retorted, "I would sooner have a spoiled gown than remain here till noonday. Give me the support of your arm and I will try to raise myself. Perhaps, with the aid of your stick, I might then be able to hobble home."
Thus admonished, Ronnay de Maurel, stooping low, held out his arm, and the exquisite creature placed one tiny hand upon it, then coolly bade him hold the other. Mechanically he obeyed, thinking all the while that the lovely fingers—slender and velvety like the petals of a lily—would be crushed to pieces in his grasp.