Guy said that it looked bad to ride when the ladies were walking, but he was able in this way to share in mountain expeditions, and Cuthbert hoped that he enjoyed them. Constancy had always liked him, and was ready to plunge into all the new discussions for which her recent studies had prepared her. She was well aware that he now and then said things which enabled her to think as well as talk, and he argued with her, and drew her out, feeling as if she were a clever and agreeable child. When he cut out a square of tiny flowerets and still tinier growths of leaf and blade, and packed it carefully in a sandwich box to send it home, he felt as if he was laying an offering before a shrine. When he studied the names of the flowers with Constancy, he felt that he had a good comrade in a mountain ramble.
One day something happened to her. She went out alone by a little craggy path behind the hotel, which led along the top of a steep descent to the river. She pursued it thinking of nothing but of adding a new specimen or two to her store of flowers, and presently saw a dog-rose of a peculiarly bright pink, hanging over the edge, and bent to pick it; the stone on which she stepped gave way, and she slid downwards, and stopped herself by catching at the rose just on the edge of—nothing. An inch further, and she would have fallen into the roaring torrent a hundred feet below.
For one awful moment, she believed that she could not turn and save herself; the next, strong, cool, and active, she had cautiously felt for hand and foot hold, and began to climb up again, to find her hand, as she neared the top, enclosed in a firm clasp, while Guy’s voice said—
“Steady; you’re all right. Hold on. I can’t lift you, but I won’t let you go.”
As he spoke, she was safe on the path again, but shaking from head to foot. He drew her away from the edge of the precipice, and she sat down on a bit of rock, and hid her face in her hands. She was mentally, as well as physically, dizzy, and he did not speak to her till she dropped her hands on her lap, and said, with an odd ring in her voice—
“Well! I was nearly killed!”
“Your nerve saved you. You were nearly safe when I came up, but it was an awkward place. Remember, you can’t be too careful on a mountain.”
“Well!” she said again, “I thought I should be killed; I thought of everything. I thought of the bit in the college magazine about me—about my being found—and Florella—”
“Yes,” said Guy, “one does think, in such moments, of the dearest.”
Constancy was silent. A deep crimson blush burned over her face and neck down to her very finger-tips.