“Not for a few minutes,” he urged. “You are hardly recovered from the shock of your danger. Sit down here and rest first.”
A bank rising to the gnarled tree-roots made an inviting couch, and they sat down.
“I wish,” Von Tressen said, “I had come along this way half an hour earlier.”
“I, too, wish you had,” she replied frankly. “Still I ought to be thankful that some one was at hand to save me.”
“And may I not be thankful, too?” he said warmly. “Only, if it had been my luck to have been the man, it might have expiated the wound I inflicted by saving you from a worse.”
“I have told you that your act is already expiated,” she said softly.
“It might have been wiped out, forgotten.”
“If I do not want to forget it?”
“Fräulein! You like to remember that I gave you pain?”
“Are we not told that pain often brings good in its train?”