Betty held out her arms, with a merry laugh. “Why, of course I could. I’m not one bit hurt, except scratched. The ferns are just as soft as a feather bed down here, but the thorns up above are dreadful. I can’t seem to pull myself up. I’m a little faint, I guess.”
A minute later she was standing in the road, leaning against Madeline, who felt of her anxiously and asked again and again if it didn’t hurt.
“Hasn’t she broken her collar-bone?” asked Bob, who was holding the horses. “People generally do when they have a bad spill. Are her arms all right?”
“I suppose I didn’t know how to fall in the proper way,” explained Betty, wearily. “I can’t remember how it happened, only all at once I found myself down on those ferns with my face scratched and smarting. If Mr. Ware went by ahead of you I suppose I must have been stunned, for I didn’t see him.”
“He’s probably hunting distractedly for you on the hill,” said Bob, glad to have something definite to do. “I think he’s caught Lady, and I’ll go and tell him that we’ve caught you.”
Just then Professor Henderson’s surrey drove up. It had come for Billy, and Babbie had thoughtfully sent it on to bring back “whoiver’s hurted,” the groom explained. But he made no objection to taking in Betty, though, rather to Billy’s disappointment, she did not come under that category.
“I never saw a broken arm, ner a broken leg, ner a broken anything,” he murmured sleepily. “I thought I’d have a chance now. Say, can I please put my head in your lap?”
“My, but your knees wiggle something awful,” Billy complained a minute later. “Don’t you think they’re cracked, maybe?”
So Madeline put the sleepy elves in front with the driver and got in herself beside Betty. Curled up in Madeline’s strong arms she cried a little and laughed a good deal, never noticing that Madeline was crying, too. For just beyond the berry-patch there was a heap of big stones, which made everything that Bob and Madeline had feared in that dreadful time of suspense seem very reasonable and Betty’s escape from harm little short of a miracle.
It was striking eleven when the riding party and the surrey turned up the campus drive and the B’s noticed with dismay that the Westcott was brilliantly lighted.