"No," murmured Anne. Her eyes were blood-shot; she saw him through a crimson cloud.
"Keep me firmly," he called out, warningly, to Dexter. Then, letting go his first hold, he stretched down still farther, made a slight spring forward, and succeeded in grasping Valeria's waist. "Now pull up, and quickly," he said, panting.
And thus, together, Valeria firmly held by Heathcote, the two rescuers and the rescued were drawn safely up from danger to safe level again. Only a few feet, but all the difference between life and death.
When the others looked down upon the now uncovered space, they saw that it was only the stump of a slender cedar sapling, a few inches in height, and two little edges of rock standing up unevenly here and there, which had formed the parapet. A person might have tried all day, with an acrobat's net spread below for safety, to cling there, without success; Valeria had fallen at the one angle and in the one position which made it possible. Two arms were strained, and that was all.
Isabel was white with nervous fear; the others showed traces of tears. But the cause of all this anxiety and trouble, although entirely uninjured and not nervous (she had not seen herself), sat smiling upon them all in a sweet suffering-martyr way, and finally went down the hill with masculine escort on each side—apotheosis not before attained. Will it be believed that this girl, fairly well educated and in her sober senses, was simpleton enough to say to Heathcote that evening, in a sentimental whisper, "How I wish that Miss Douglas had not touched me!" There was faint moonlight, and the simpering expression of the neutral face filled him with astonishment. Dexter would have understood: Dexter was accustomed to all varieties of women, even the Valeria variety: but Heathcote was not. All he said, therefore, was, "Why?"
"Because then you alone would have saved me," murmured Valeria, sweetly.
"If Miss Douglas had not grasped you as she did, we might all have been too late," replied Heathcote, looking at her in wonder.
"Ah, no; I did not slip farther. You would have been in time," said the belle of Morleville, with what she considered a telling glance. And she actually convinced herself that she had made an impression.
"I ought not to have done it, of course, Louisa," she said to her bosom-friend, in the privacy of her own room, after her return to Morleville; "but I really felt that he deserved at least that reward for his great devotion to me, poor fellow!"
"And why couldn't you like him, after all, Valeria dear?" urged Louisa, deeply interested, and not a little envious.