“I’m all right—I did it.”
In his joy Jacquelin actually kissed her. It seemed to him afterward to mark an epoch.
The next quarter of an hour was passed in getting Blair’s breath back. Fortunately for her, if not for her dress, her clothes had caught here and there as she came crashing through the branches, and though the breath was knocked out of her, and she was shaken and scratched and stunned, no bones were broken, and she was not seriously hurt after all. She proposed that they should say nothing about it to anyone: she could get his Mammy to mend her clothes. But this magnanimous offer Jacquelin firmly declined. He was afraid that Blair might be hurt some way that she did not know, and he declared that he should go straight and tell it at the house.
“But I did it myself,” persisted little Blair; “you were not to blame. You called to me not to do it.”
“Did you hear me call? Then why did you do it?”
“Because you had done it and said I could not.”
“But didn’t you know you would get hurt?”
She nodded.
“I thought so.”
Jacquelin looked at her long and seriously, and that moment a new idea seemed to him to enter his mind: that, after all, it might be as brave to do a dangerous thing which you are afraid to do, as if you are not at all afraid.