“No, she has fainted, give me your hat.”
Before he could do so she had seized it, and was running as quickly as her exhaustion would allow towards a spring that bubbled up a hundred yards away, and which once had been the water supply of the old abbey.
Ernest went on rubbing for a minute or more, but without producing the slightest effect. He was in despair. The beautiful face beneath him looked so wan and death-like; all the red had left her lips. In his distress, and scarcely knowing what he did, he bent over them and kissed them, once, twice, thrice. That mode of restoration is not recommended in the medicine-chest “guide,” but in this instance it was not without its effect. Presently a faint and tremulous glow diffused itself over the pale cheek; in another moment it deepened to a most unmistakable blush. (Was it a half-consciousness of Ernest’s new method of treatment, or merely the returning blood, that produced the blush? Let us not inquire.) Next Eva sighed, opened her eyes, and sat up.
“O, you are not dead!”
“No, I don’t think so, but I can’t quite remember. What was it? Ah, I know;” and she shut her eyes, as though to keep out some horrid sight. Presently she opened them again. “You have saved my life,” she said. “If it had not been for you, I should have now been lying crushed at the foot of that dreadful cliff. I am so grateful.”’
At that moment Dorothy came back with a little water in Ernest’s black hat, for in her hurry she had spilled most of it.
“Here, drink some of this,” she said.
Eva tried to do so; but a billycock hat is not a very convenient drinking-vessel till you get used to it, and she upset more than she swallowed. But what she drank did her good. She put down the hat, and they all three laughed a little; it was so funny drinking out of an old hat.
“Were you long down there before we came?” asked Dorothy.
“No, not long; only about half a minute on that dreadful bulge.”