“Oh, Seth,” she asked earnestly, “Are you hurt? Do you feel any pain?”
“Not a bit” he replied—“only dizzy like. By George! How they did come down though. I must have had a pretty narrow squeak of it. Funny—I don’t remember coming out at all.”
She smiled now. “I should think not. You lay perfectly senseless way out there among the logs. We fished you out, and dragged you up here. I feel like a heroine in a Crusader’s romance, really!”
It entered Seth’s mind to say something nice in reply, that she looked like one, or that they were not equal in those benighted ages to producing such women, or something of that sort; but his tongue did not seem to frame the words easily and as he looked up at her he grew shy once again, and felt himself flushing under her smile, and only said vacuously, “Mightly lucky I wasn’t alone, isn’t it?” Annie appeared on the scene now, her clothes steaming from the heat of the fire, over which she had endeavoured to dry them, and her teeth displaying a spasmodic tendency to knock together between sentences. She too was full of solicitude as to Seth’s condition, and to satisfy this he reluctantly sat up, stretched his arms out, felt of the bump on his forehead, beat his chest, and finally stood erect.
“I’m all right, you see” he said—“only, bo-o-o, I’m cold,” and he made for the fire, upon which Annie had heaped brushwood, which crackled and snapped now, giving forth a furious heat.
They stood about the fire for a considerable time. Isabel was opposite Seth, rather ostentatiously drying sundry damp places in her dress which had come in contact with the rescued man’s dripping hair and clothes. He was so interested in watching her, and in thinking half-regret fully, half-jubilantly, that she had been put to this discomfort in saving his life, that he failed to notice how completely drenched his cousin had been. The conversation turned entirely, of course, upon the recent great event, but it was desultory and broken by long intervals of silence, and somehow Seth did not get any clear idea of how he was saved, much less of the parts the two women had respectively played in the rescue.
It would be unfair to say that Isabel purposely misrepresented anything; it is nearer the truth to describe her as confounding her own anxiety with her companion’s action. At all events, the narrative to be gleaned from her scattering descriptions and exclamations had the effect of creating in Seth’s mind the impression that he could never be sufficiently grateful to his sister-in-law.
As for Annie, the whole momentous episode had come so swiftly, had been so imperative, exhaustive in its demands of all her faculties, and then had so suddenly dwindled to the unromantic conditions of drying wet clothes at a brush fire, that her thoughts upon it were extremely confused. She scarcely took part in the conversation. Perhaps she felt vaguely that her own share in the thing was not made to stand forth with all the prominence it deserved, but she took it for granted that, in his first waking moments, while he was alone with Isabel, Seth had been told the central fact of her going into the water for him, and, if he was not effusively grateful, why—it was not Seth’s way to be demonstrative. Besides she said to herself, she did not want to be thanked.
Still, late that night, long hours after Seth had said good-night to her at the Warren gate, and she had almost guiltily stolen up to her room without braving her grandmother’s questions, Annie could not go to sleep for thinking:—
“He might at least have looked some thanks, even if he did not speak them.”