"Drink this," he said quickly, pressing the tumbler against her lip.
Her teeth chattered against the rim. Miss Crupps was weeping silently. Di pushed away the glass and stared wildly about her.
What was this great crowd of eyes kept back by a chain of men? What was that man in a red uniform with a trumpet, craning forward to see? There was a sound of women crying. How dark it was! Where was the moon gone to?
"What is it?" she whispered hoarsely, stretching out her hands to Lord Hemsworth, and looking at him with an agony of appeal. "What has happened?"
But he only took her hands and held them hard in his. If he could have died to spare her that next moment he would have done it.
"When I say three," said a distinct voice near at hand. "Gently, men. One, two, three. That's it."
Di turned sharply in the direction of the voice. There was a knot of people on the ice at a little distance. One was kneeling down. Another knelt too, holding a lantern ringed with mist. As she looked, the others raised something between them in a fur rug, something heavy, and began to move slowly to the bank.
Her face took a rigid look. She remembered. She rose suddenly to her feet with a voiceless cry, and would have fallen forward on her face had not Lord Hemsworth caught her in his arms. He held her closely to him, and put his shaking blood-stained hand over her eyes. Miss Crupps sobbed aloud. Mr. Lumley sat down by her, telling her not to cry, and assuring her that it would all be all right; but when he was not comic he was not up to much.
There was no need to keep the crowd off any longer. Their whole interest centred in John, and they broke away in murmuring masses along the bank, and down the ice, in the wake of the little band with the lantern.
Now that the lantern had gone, the place was wrapped in a white darkness. The other lights had apparently gone out, except the red end of a torch on the bank. The mist was covering the valley.