"Is there no other way, George?"
"No, don't you follow me; go back by the lane and I'll bring you the brush if I can save it."
So saying, the master turned his horse and set himself at the place where the wall looked lowest. Kate had been bred in a hunting country, but truth to tell, her heart hung on that leap.
"One thrust to his hat and two to the sides of his brown," and then he shot to the front, seat steady and hands well down. Right bravely the horse rose at the leap, but the bank broke as he rose, his knees caught the coping stone with a jarring thud, and man and horse lay stunned on the other side.
To the wild cry of "George, George!" no answer came back, and then it was for the first time that poor Kate knew how irretrievably her heart had been lost to her dashing cousin.
To gallop to the gate was useless, though she essayed it. The gate was six barred and locked, moreover, the wall and its guarding stream still ran on beyond the gate. Kate had lost her head and her heart, but not her pluck.
"Just one more try, Joe," she whispered, and with a rush that seemed born of the last energies of a gallant heart the brave old horse faced and cleared the coping stone. Many fresh horses might have cleared that wall; but they talk of that leap still in Gonaway. Nearly five feet of hard stone and a biggish brook in front was no small feat, they say, for a tired horse, even with bonny Kate Lowry on his back.
Under the wall lay the grey, stone dead, and under him George Vernon, his white face looking up at the sky now darkly bright with the frost of a November evening.
How Kate got her cousin from under his horse and watched the colour creep back to his bronzed cheek, no one knows, for she kept these things in her own sweet heart, but it was late in the evening that a party sent out to search met an old woman leading along a donkey cart, on which lay poor Vernon, his leg and collar bone broken, while beside him sat a lady, her face white with pain, which her colour alone betrayed, and after them came a yokel leading old Joe, and followed by the best pack in Ireland.
The day had one more event in store for the villagers of Kempford. Arrived at the inn, Kate Lowry did what no Lowry had ever been known to do before—she fainted. On recovering, she shame-facedly exclaimed, "I think I must have broken something when I fell at the beginning of the run, and it has hurt me rather ever since."