Nan bestowed one of her delightful smiles upon the good woman, who, leaving the hot water in readiness; hurried out to tell her husband that if Miss Davenant was going to be mistress of the Hall, why, then, 'twould be a lucky day for everyone concerned, for a nicer, pleasanter-spoken young lady—and she just come round from a faint and all!—she never wished to meet.
Nan put her hand up to her throat.
"Something hurts here," she said in a troubled voice. "Did one of the hounds leap up at my neck?"
"No," replied Trenby, frowning as his eyes rested on the long red weal
striping the white flesh disclosed by the Y-shaped neck of her frock.
"One of those dunder-headed fools cut you with his whip by mistake.
I'd like to shoot him—and Vengeance too!"
With a wonderfully gentle touch he laid a cloth wrung out in hot water across the angry-looking streak, and repeated the process until some of the swelling went down. At last he desisted, wiping dry the soft girlish throat as tenderly as a nurse might wipe the throat of a baby.
More than a little touched, Nan smiled at him.
"You're making a great fuss of me," she said. "After all, I'm not seriously hurt, you know."
"No," he replied briefly. "But you might have been killed. For a moment I thought you were going to be killed in front of my eyes."
"I don't know that it would have mattered, very much if I had been," she responded indifferently.
"It would have mattered to me." His voice roughened again: "Nan—Nan—"