His solicitude for her, in his own danger and pain, quite touched Miss
Edith. She bent over him with maternal tenderness.
"There is no fear for me. I feel perfectly warm as I told you, and can easily keep myself so. And if you think I could leave you, or any one else with a broken leg, to die, you mistake me greatly, that is all. I will stay with you if it be till morning."
He gave one of her hands a feebly grateful squeeze. It was a last effort. His numbed and broken limb gave a horrible twinge, there was a faint gasp, and then this young man fainted quietly away.
She bent above him in despair. A great fear filled her—was he dead, this stranger in whom she was interested already? She lifted his head on her lap, she chafed his face and hands in an agony of pity and terror.
"Charley!" she called, with something like a sob; "O Charley, don't die! Wake up—speak to me."
But cold and white as the snow itself, "Charley" lay, dumb and unresponsive.
And so an hour wore on.
What an hour it was—more like an eternity. In all her after-life—its pride and its glory, its downfall and disgrace, that night remained vividly in her memory.
She woke many and many a night, starting up in her warm bed, from some startling dream, that she was back, lost in the snow, with Charley lying lifeless in her lap.
But help was at hand. It was close upon nine o'clock, when, through the deathly white silence, the sound of many voices came. When over the cold glitter of the winter night, the red light of lanterns flared, Don Caesar came plunging headlong through the drifts to his little mistress' side, with loud and joyful barking, licking her face, her hands, her feet. They were saved.