He pulled out a folded handkerchief.
“Let me offer you this. Can you staunch the bleeding till I fetch a doctor?”
She reached for the handkerchief without looking at her companion.
“Thank you. I will take that. But you need not bother about a doctor.”
“But surely you will allow me——”
She interrupted him with the same equable voice.
“If you will direct me to the nearest road to Gorla’s Farm, I won’t trouble you any more.”
His look of concern was gradually changing to one of puzzled surprise. He could not make her out, nor tell whether she was seriously offended with him or not, so little emotion, or even expression, did she evince. His self-reproaches and vehement apologies seemed to go for nothing. The girl made even less of them than she did of her wounded hand, and she regarded that coolly enough. But a man does not, even unwittingly, inflict bodily harm on another, still less on a woman, without feeling genuine regret for it, and this man could not at once check his expressions of sorrow, cavalierly as they were received.
“You are not to blame,” the girl said at last with decision. “It was a pure accident; it was my own fault. I had no business to play hide and seek in a shooting ground. I ought to have known better and may be thankful the affair is no worse. And if it had been——. Now, as it is getting late I must be making my way homewards.”
He looked surprised. “Do you live in these wilds?”