“You couldn’t walk that distance, of course,” he remarked.
She endeavoured to get to her feet, but seemed to give way. He reached out his hands. She took them, and he helped her up. His face was anxious. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?” he asked. “There’s nothing broken,” she answered. “No bones, anyway. But I don’t feel—” She swayed. He put an arm around her.
“I don’t feel as if I could walk even a mile,” she continued. “It’s shaken me so.”
“Or else you’re hurt badly inside,” he said apprehensively.
“No, no, I’m sure not,” she answered. “It’s only the shock.”
“Can you walk a little?” he asked. “This poor horse—let’s get away from it. There’s a good place over there—see!” He pointed to a little rise in the ground where were a few stunted trees and some long grass and shrubs. “Can you walk?”
“Oh, yes, I’m all right,” she answered nervously. “I don’t need your arm. I can walk by myself.”
“I think not—well, not yet, anyhow,” he answered soothingly. “Please do as you’re told. I’m keeping my arm around you for the present.”
Always in the past she had obeyed, when commanded by her mother or husband, with an apathy which had smothered her youth. Now her youth seemed to drink eagerly a cup of obedience—as though it were the wine of life itself. She even longed to obey the voice whispering in her soul from ever so far away: “Close—close to him! Home is in his arms.”
With all her unconscious revelation of herself, however, there was that in her which was pure maidenliness. For, married as she was, she had never in any real sense been a wife, or truly understood what wifedom meant, or heard in her heart the call of the cradle. She had been the victim of possession, which had meant no more to her than to be, as it were, subjected daily to the milder tortures of the Inquisition.