"But I am distraught," she wailed; "and there is naught but death for both of us."
'Twas a strange situation for a young man to find himself in, watching by the roadside the hysteric frenzy of a maddened girl; but as he had been unconscious on the day he stood, an unclad man, giving the aid that would save a life, so he thought now of naught but the agony he saw in this poor creature's awful eyes and heard in her strangled cries. It mattered naught to him that any passing would have thought themselves gazing upon a scene in a strange story.
There was a little clear stream near, and he went and brought her water, making her drink it and bathe the dust-stains from her face and hands, and the gentle authority with which he made her do these simple things seemed somehow to somewhat calm her madness. She looked up at him staring, and with long, sobbing breaths.
"Who—are you?" she asked, helplessly.
"I am the Marquess of Roxholm," he answered, "and I ride to my father's house at Camylott; but I cannot leave you until I know you are safe."
"Safe!" she said. "I safe!" and she clasped her hands about her knees as she sat, wringing her fingers together. "You do not ask me who I am," she added.
"I need not know your name to do you service," he answered. "But I must ask you where you would go—to rest."
"To Death—from which you have plucked me!" was her reply, and she dropped her head against her held-up knees and broke forth sobbing again. "I tell you there is naught else. If your horse had beat my face into the dust, none would have known where I lay at last. Five days have I walked and my very clothes I changed with a gipsy woman. None would have known." Suddenly she looked up with shame and terror in her eyes, the blood flaming in her face. She involuntarily clutched at his sleeve as if in her horror she must confide even to this stranger. "They had begun to look at me—and whisper," she said. "And one day a girl who hated me laughed outright as I passed—though I strove to bear myself so straightly—and I heard her mock me. 'Pride cometh first,' she said, 'and then the fall. She hath fallen far.'"
She looked so young and piteous that Roxholm felt a mist pass before his eyes.
"Poor child!" he said; "poor child!"