Finally she rose, resolved by her very despair. Water and help she must have. If no nearer than the palace, then to the palace she must go. Shâhzâd had taken advantage of liberty to seek a wheat field, but Bronzewing would carry her with the stirrup over. The mare, however, distrusting strangers, sidled off, still circling faithfully round her master. Then the girl's hopes and fears centred themselves on the immediate necessity for success. She coaxed, wheedled, cajoled, forgetting all else, till all of a sudden Bronzewing paused to whinny, and Rose, looking round instinctively, recognised the magnitude of her past despair in the light of her great relief as she saw Lewis Gordon, raised on one elbow, looking at her in a dazed sort of way. She was on her knees beside him in a minute, confessing the past fear she had so strenuously denied while it existed.
'I thought you were dead!' she cried. 'I thought you were dead.' She was trembling and shaking all over, quite visibly, and he gave an unsteady laugh.
'Thumped the back of my head; that's all. No!' a spasm of pain passed over his face as he sat up. 'My collarbone's gone. Well! it might have been worse. The ground is uncommonly hard.'
Worse indeed! Rose could not speak for a lump in her throat; but the loquacity of escape was upon him.
'Must have pitched on my shoulder, luckily. I don't in the least remember how it happened. We were partridging, I suppose; but my mind is an absolute blank. No wonder! my head is just splitting; but I can walk home all right.'
And when she proposed riding Bronzewing for help, he negatived it firmly on the ground that the mare wasn't broken in for a lady; a man never having such a strong hold on his individual quips and cranks as when he realises that he has been within an ace of losing them altogether; whence comes the proverbial captiousness of convalescents.
So she had to be content with giving him a hand up and walking beside him, feeling a sad trembling in the knees joined to a general sensation of having gone to pieces. He, on the contrary, talking and laughing in magnificent, manly fashion.
'You had better tell me how it happened,' he said, as they neared the palace. 'People make such a fuss, that it is as well to be prepared. Did you see me come to grief?'