She, forgetting all her reserve, bent over him in an agony of terror.
“Oh! Tom, Tom!” she cried, as she knelt down by his side, their faces nearly touching, and her hair sweeping across his cheek. “They have killed you! They have killed you!”
And the sun still shone down, and the fleecy clouds still sailed overhead, and the summer breeze rippled through the trees.
“Lizzie, my darling! I’m so happy: I wish I could die now,” murmured Tom, in disconnected fragments, and he fainted away outright.
“Oh! he’s dead! He’s dead!” cried Lizzie, out aloud, wringing her hands, bursting into an agony of tears—tears, idle tears!
“Bless my soul!” said the doctor, bursting through the bushes, as he arrived very opportunely on the scene of action, out of breath with the haste he had made. “Bless my soul! Who’s dead, what’s dead? It’s all confounded nonsense,” he continued, excitedly, bending down over Tom, and tearing open his coat and shirt, and feeling his heart. “Bless my soul! He’s no more dead than you are, my dear! The man’s only fainted.”