He offered to yield the wreck to her hands, and, drawn from her place, she went and stooped on one knee to the firelight. De Zhirley dropped on one knee beside her, and they tried to fit the mangled parts in place again.
“It’s such a spite,” said Jeanne, and her trembling voice comforted him as a mother comforts her child. He had instant anxiety to make the calamity appear less to her than it really was.
“Mebby by patchin’ and glue I can put it together again—though I don’t know whether it’ll sound the same. I’ve always thought so much of it,” he apologized.
“I wish he had broke my neck instead of this fiddle’s,” said the girl with passion.
“I’d like to see him try such a thing as that,” responded the fiddler sternly. “I’d killed him as ’twas, if I hadn’t been bigger than him.”
“I must go back,” exclaimed Jeanne, stirring to rise from this post-mortem. “They’ll think I’ve fell in the river.”
“I’ll go with you,” said De Zhirley. “It’s dark now, and that fellow ain’t gone far.”
“No,” objected Jeanne, with sudden terror of what her neighborhood called a beau. “I don’t want no one with me.”
De Zhirley took up his cap with gentle insistence like the courtliness of a great seignior. He smiled at Jeanne, and she gave him back a look of which she was unconscious.
“Your supper’s all ready,” she reminded him.