"My impression was that both sides were mine. I will have the matter carefully inquired into. If your statement proves to be correct I will see that a communication is sent to you, conveying my apologies for having been an unwitting trespasser on your estate."
"Thank you. Can I lift you over?"
"Lift me over!"
The air of red-hot indignation with which his proposition was declined ought to have scorched him. It seemed, however, to have no effect on him of any sort. He continued to regard her from the top of the bank, with an air of indolent nonchalance, which was rapidly driving her to the conclusion that he was the most insolent person she had ever encountered. With a view, possibly, of showing the full absurdity of his offer of assistance, she placed both hands on the top of the fence, with the intention of vaulting over it. The intention was only partially fulfilled. During her wanderings with her father among their Cumberland hills she had become skilled in all manner of athletic exercises. Ordinarily she would have thought nothing of vaulting--or, for the matter of that, jumping--an insignificant fence. Perhaps her nervous system was more disorganised than she imagined. She caught her knee against the bar, and, instead of alighting gracefully on her feet, she rolled ignominiously over. She was up almost as soon as she was down, but not before he had cleared the fence at a bound, and was standing at her side. She exhibited no sign of gratitude for the rapidity with which he had come to her assistance. She merely put to him an icy question,--
"Was it necessary that you should trespass also?"
"Are you sure that you are not hurt? ankle not twisted, or anything of that kind?"
"Quite sure. Be so good as to return to your own side."
As he seemed to hesitate, a voice exclaimed, in husky tones,--
"By----, I've a mind to shoot you now."
He turned to see a man, between forty and fifty years of age, in the unmistakable habiliments of a gamekeeper, standing some twenty feet off, holding a gun in a fashion which suggested that it would need very little to induce him to put it to his shoulder and pull the trigger. Hugh Morice greeted him as if he were an old acquaintance.