As Lady Susan scrambled down the other side of the bank she said mechanically to herself that Hugh must have taken another turn before they crossed the railway, only for that she would have seen him when she looked back before she rode at her last jump. How extraordinarily well he had been going—how long ago it seemed, and yet it could only have been about ten minutes. Below her stretched the long fields up which Solomon had carried her; the mist swept thick and cold across them, shutting out the rest of the world, and making their loneliness more complete. A grey horse was moving up the field towards her; she walked uneasily towards it, crippled by her safety habit, stiff in every limb.{177} She could at first only make out that it was lame, she neared and saw a saddle and dangling reins. The stillness of the hillside seemed to tell her the rest. She came up to the grey horse and took him by the head; he was dead lame and trembling all over, there was mud on his jaw, on his shoulder, on the saddle. She had seen before what horses looked like after a bad fall. She led him down the field in the direction from which he had come, and saw, away by the fence, a motionless spot of scarlet and white. In a few moments she was on her knees beside her husband. His face was buried in a heather tussock, his hands were clinched in the black and boggy soil; as she tried to turn him over the blood trickled heavily from the corner of his mouth. A little gurgling sound in his throat told her that he was alive, but he was far away in that trance of physical defeat in which soul and body seem alike absorbed.
She was wholly unversed in illness, un-{178}acquainted with death, but in the novels she had read episodes of fainting had been freely scattered, and they had left a general idea in her mind. With shaking fingers, shaking from her recent struggle and the impact of this latest shock, she unfastened Hugh’s hunting-tie and the neck of his shirt, while her sinking heart told her of her own ignorance and loneliness, and the white face remained unmoved. It seemed to have become smaller, and the temples hollow and blue. She took off the glove from the heavy, listless hand, and tried with her unskilled fingers to feel the pulse. It was just perceptible, and at the contact with that thread of life shut up inside the intolerable mystery of unconsciousness, the fear, the paralyzing helplessness began to give way. Something like the clinking of a tin can came to her ear, and she started up. Two little girls, with red petticoats over their heads, were crossing the field, and Lady Susan ran towards them, calling with what voice she could muster. At{179} sight of the dishevelled vision in top-boots and a man’s hat emerging from the mist, the children seemed disposed to fly, but finally came to her. Her heart sank as she saw their hesitating, timorous faces. Could she make them understand? To every request they returned the same whispered “We will, miss,” with their lovely eyes cast down in shyness, but half-a-crown and a glimpse of the figure lying by the fence quickened their sense of the seriousness of the matter. They were taking their father’s dinner to where he was work............