"What is the matter? No serious accident, I hope and trust, Miss Black?"
"No; those wretches in uncle's stables did not half buckle the girth, and, as I was going in a hard gallop up the steep, it flew apart and gave me a tumble; that's all," said Cap, desisting a moment from her occupation to take breath.
"You were not hurt?" inquired Craven, with deep interest in his tone.
"Oh, no; there is no harm done, except to my riding skirt, which has been torn and muddied by the fall," said Cap, laughing and resuming her efforts to tighten the girth.
"Pray permit me," said Craven, gently taking the end of the strap from her hand; "this is no work for a lady, and, besides, is beyond your strength."
Capitola, thanking him, withdrew to the side of the road, and, seating herself upon the trunk of a fallen tree, began to brush the dirt from her habit.
Craven adjusted and secured the saddle with great care, patted and soothed the pony and then, approaching Capitola in the most deferential manner, stood before her and said:
"Miss Black, you will pardon me, I hope, if I tell you that the peril I had imagined you to be in has so agitated my mind as to make it impossible for me longer to withhold a declaration of my sentiments——" Here his voice, that had trembled throughout this disclosure, now really and utterly failed him.
Capitola looked up with surprise and interest; she had never in her life before heard an explicit declaration of love from anybody. She and Herbert somehow had always understood each other very well, without ever a word of technical love-making passing between them; so Capitola did not exactly know what was coming next.
Craven recovered his voice, and encouraged by the favorable manner in which she appeared to listen to him, actually threw himself at her feet and, seizing one of her hands, with much ardor and earnestness and much more eloquence than any one would have credited him with, poured forth the history of his passion and his hopes.