“Are you hurt?” called Alvina, looking up into space. The candle had disappeared.
But there was no reply. Feeling curious, she went out of the Chapel to the stairs in the side porch, and ran up to the organ. She went round the side—and there she saw a man in his shirt-sleeves sitting crouched in the obscurity on the floor between the organ and the wall of the back, while a collapsed pair of steps lay between her and him. It was too dark to see who it was.
“That rotten pair of steps came down with me,” said the infuriated voice of Arthur Witham, “and about broke my leg.”
Alvina advanced towards him, picking her way over the steps. He was sitting nursing his leg.
“Is it bad?” she asked, stooping towards him.
In the shadow he lifted up his face. It was pale, and his eyes were savage with anger. Her face was near his.
“It is bad,” he said furious because of the shock. The shock had thrown him off his balance.
“Let me see,” she said.
He removed his hands from clasping his shin, some distance above the ankle. She put her fingers over the bone, over his stocking, to feel if there was any fracture. Immediately her fingers were wet with blood. Then he did a curious thing. With both his hands he pressed her hand down over his wounded leg, pressed it with all his might, as if her hand were a plaster. For some moments he sat pressing her hand over his broken shin, completely oblivious, as some people are when they have had a shock and a hurt, intense on one point of consciousness only, and for the rest unconscious.
Then he began to come to himself. The pain modified itself. He could not bear the sudden acute hurt to his shin. That was one of his sensitive, unbearable parts.