“I’m afraid so.”
“Alive?”
He nodded. The girl lay still an instant, then she threw one arm across her eyes, and Jarvis saw that she was softly sobbing. He watched her for a little, then he took her other hand in his, holding it close and tenderly, as one would soothe an unhappy child.
“When I have taken you home,” he said, very gently, “I will come back to Betty.”
She drew her hand away quickly. “Take me home now,” she whispered.
So Jarvis, as best he could, took her home. It was a hard journey, which he would have made easier for her if he could have got her to lean against him. But she sat erect, holding herself with a white face and compressed lips, and Jarvis, thinking things he dared not put into words, drove with as little jolt and jar as might be back to the Hempstead Farms.
Joe, coming across the barnyard, saw them, looked at them a second time, and strode hurriedly forward. Jarvis would have given the horses into his charge and looked after the girl himself, but she forestalled him, and it was Joe, the man of overalls and wide straw hat, who helped her to her room, the porch being for the moment mercifully bereft of boarders. It was the sunny hour of the morning there.
But presently she sent for him. He went at once, for he was preparing, with Joe, to go to the injured horse. Mrs. Hempstead took him to Miss Farnsworth’s room, and stayed stiffly by while he crossed to the bed where the girl lay, still in her riding habit. As he came to her she held out her hand.
“Please forgive me,” she said, with her head turned away. “I might have killed—you.”
“No—you couldn’t. I’ve something to live for, so I’m invulnerable—till I get it.”