He had come to this mishap in his attempt to help her. He was dying, perhaps, in her service. A thrill ran through her, a thrill that moved her as by an uncontrollable impulse to bend still lower over him so that her lips almost touched his unconscious ones. Their nearness, the intent gaze of her eyes, now dark as violets, seemed to make themselves felt by him, seemed by some mysterious power to call him back from the shadow-land of unconsciousness. He moved and opened his eyes.
She started, and the colour flooded her face as if her lips had quite touched his, and her eyes grew heavy as, breathing painfully, she waited for him to entirely recover his intelligence and to speak.
"The steer!" he said at last, feebly.
She moistened her lips, and looked away from him as if she were afraid lest he should see what was in her eyes. "The steer is all right; but—but you!"
He forced a laugh. "Oh, I'm all right, too," he said. He looked around hazily. "I must have come a smasher over that bank!"
Then he saw that he was lying with his head upon her knee, and with a hot flush, the man's shame for his weakness in the presence of a woman, he struggled into a sitting posture and looked at her, looked at her with the forced cheerfulness of a man who has come an unforeseen, unexpected cropper of the first magnitude.
"It was my fault. You—you were right about the horse: he ought not to have slipped—Where's my hat? Oh here it is. The horse isn't lame, I hope?"
"No," she said, setting her teeth in her great effort to appear calm and unmoved. "He is standing beside Rupert—" She had got thus far when her voice broke, and she turned her face away quickly; but not so quickly that he did not see her exceeding pallor, the heavy droop of the lids, the sweep of the dark lashes on her white cheek.
"Why—what's the matter, Miss Heron?" he asked, anxiously, and with all a man's obtuseness. "You didn't happen to come to grief in any way? I didn't fall on you?—or anything? I—"
She tried to laugh, tried to laugh scornfully; for indeed she was filled with scorn for this sudden inexplicable weakness, a weakness which had never assailed her before in all her life, a weakness which filled her breast with rage; but from under the closed lids two tears crept and rolled down her cheek; and against her will she made confession of this same foolish weakness.