"Gardez vous," cried the horseman, as he was borne on to the place where Lucille and the stranger stood against the wall; "are ye mad—why do you not run?"
"For heaven's sake, for mercy sake, he is blind!" cried Lucille, clinging to the stranger's side.
"Save yourself, my kind guide!" said the stranger. But Lucille dreamt not of such desertion. The trooper wrested the horse's head from the spot where they stood; with a snort, as he felt the spur, the enraged animal lashed out with its hind legs; and Lucille, unable to save both, threw herself before the blind man, and received the shock directed against him; her slight and delicate arm fell shattered by her side—the horseman was borne onward. "Thank God, you are saved!" was poor Lucille's exclamation; and she fell, overcome with pain and terror, into the arms which the stranger mechanically opened to receive her.
"My guide, my friend!" cried he, "you are hurt, you—"
"No, sir," interrupted Lucille, faintly, "I am better, I am well. This arm, if you please—we are not far from your hotel now."
But the stranger's ear, tutored to every inflection of voice, told him at once of the pain she suffered; he drew from her by degrees the confession of the injury she had sustained; but the generous girl did not tell him it had been incurred solely in his protection. He now insisted on reversing their duties, and accompanying her to her home; and Lucille, almost fainting with pain, and hardly able to move, was forced to consent. But a few steps down the next turning stood the humble mansion of her father—they reached it—and Lucille scarcely crossed the threshold, before she sank down, and for some minutes was insensible to pain. It was left to the stranger to explain, and to beseech them immediately to send for a surgeon, "the most skilful—the most practised in town," said he. "See, I am rich, and this is the least I can do to atone to your generous daughter for not forsaking even a stranger in peril."
He held out his purse as he spoke, but the father refused the offer; and it saved the blind man some shame that he could not see the blush of honest resentment with which so poor a species of remuneration was put aside.
The young man staid till the surgeon arrived, till the arm was set; nor did he depart until he had obtained a promise from the mother, that he should learn the next morning how the sufferer had passed the night.
The next morning, indeed, he had intended to quit a town that offers but little temptation to the traveller; but he tarried day after day, until Lucille herself accompanied her mother to assure him of her recovery.
You know, or at least I do, dearest Gertrude, that there is such a thing as love at the first meeting—a secret and unaccountable affinity between persons (strangers before,) which draws them irresistibly together. If there were truth in Plato's beautiful phantasy, that our souls were a portion of the stars, it might be, that spirits thus attracted to each other, have drawn their original light from the same orb; and they thus but yearn for a renewal of their former union. Yet, without recurring to such ideal solutions of a daily mystery, it was but natural that one in the forlorn and desolate condition of Eugene St. Amand, should have felt a certain tenderness for a person who had so generously suffered for his sake.