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.

She started, and the colour flooded her face as if her lips had quite touched his, and her eyes grew heavy as, breathing painfully, she waited for him to entirely recover his intelligence and to speak.

“The steer!” he said at last, feebly.

She moistened her lips, and looked away from him as if she were afraid lest he should see what was in her eyes.  “The steer is all right; but—­but you!”

He forced a laugh.  “Oh, I’m all right, too,” he said.  He looked around hazily.  “I must have come a smasher over that bank!”

Then he saw that he was lying with his head upon her knee, and with a hot flush, the man’s shame for his weakness in the presence of a woman, he struggled into a sitting posture and looked at her, looked at her with the forced cheerfulness of a man who has come an unforeseen, unexpected cropper of the first magnitude.