A shout awoke her from her reverie; and looking up she saw the missing
steer forcing its way through a hedge on top of a bank. Stafford was
riding after it at an easy canter and coming straight for the bank. The
steer plunged through the hedge and floundered through the wide ditch,
and Ida headed it and drove it towards the rest of the herd. Then she
turned in her saddle to warn Stafford of the ditch; but as she turned
he was close upon the bank, and she saw the big hunter rise for the
leap.
A doubt as to how he would land rose in her mind, and she swung Rupert
round; and as she did so, she saw the hunter crash through the hedge,
stumble at the ditch, and fall, lurching forward, on its edge.
No man alive could have kept his seat, and Stafford came off like a
stone thrown from a catapult, and lay, face downwards, in the long, wet
grass.
Something like a hot iron shot through Ida's heart, and sent her face
white, and she rode up to him and flung herself from Rupert and knelt
beside the prostrate form.
He lay quite still; and she knew quite well what had happened: that he
had fallen on his head and stunned himself.
She remembered, at that moment, that she herself had once so fallen;
but the remembrance did nothing to soften her present anxiety. She
knelt beside him and lifted his head on her knee, and his white face
smote her accusingly. He was still, motionless so long that she began
to fear--was he dead? She asked herself the question with a heavy
pulsation of the heart, with a sense of irrevocable loss. If he was
dead, then--then--what had she lost!
Trembling in every limb, she laid her hand upon his heart. It beat, but
slowly, reluctantly. She looked round her with a sense of helplessness.
She had never been placed in such a position before. Not far from her
was a mountain rill, and she ran to it with unsteady steps and soaked
her handkerchief in it, and bathed the white, smooth forehead.
Even at that moment she noticed, half unconsciously, the clear-cut,
patrician features, the delicate lines of the handsome face.
He had come to this mishap in his attempt to help her. He was dying,
perhaps, in her service. A thrill ran through her, a thrill that moved
her as by an uncontrollable impulse to bend still lower over him so
that her lips almost touched his unconscious ones. Their nearness, the
intent gaze of her eyes, now dark as violets, seemed to make themselves
felt by him, seemed by some mysterious power to call him back from the
shadow-land of unconsciousness. He moved and opened his eyes.