The return was down-hill, and they went back in half the time it had taken them to come.  But even with this speed they were late, and the twilight was deepening when the last turn of their road brought them in sight of the new village.  There a wild noise of cries for help burst upon the air, mixed with the shrill sound of maniac gibbering.  They saw a boy running towards the town, and nearer them a man struggling with another, whom he had caught about the middle, and was dragging towards the side of the road where it dropped, hundreds of feet, into the gorge below.

The donkey-girl called out:  “Oh, the madman!  He is killing the signor!”

Lanfear shouted.  The madman flung Gerald to the ground, and fled shrieking.  Miss Gerald had leaped from her seat, and followed Lanfear as he ran forward to the prostrate form.  She did not look at it, but within a few paces she clutched her hands in her hair, and screamed out:  “Oh, my mother is killed!” and sank, as if sinking down into the earth, in a swoon.

“No, no; it’s all right, Nannie!  Look after her, Lanfear!  I’m not hurt.  I let myself go in that fellow’s hands, and I fell softly.  It was a good thing he didn’t drop me over the edge.”  Gerald gathered himself up nimbly enough, and lent Lanfear his help with the girl.  The situation explained itself, almost without his incoherent additions, to the effect that he had become anxious, and had started out with the boy for a guide, to meet them, and had met the lunatic, who suddenly attacked him.  While he talked, Lanfear was feeling the girl’s pulse, and now and then putting his ear to her heart.  With a glance at her father:  “You’re bleeding, Mr. Gerald,” he said.

“So I am,” the old man answered, smiling, as he wiped a red stream from his face with his handkerchief.  “But I am not hurt—­”

“Better let me tie it up,” Lanfear said, taking the handkerchief from him.  He felt the unselfish quality in a man whom he had not always thought heroic, and he bound the gash above his forehead with a reverence mingling with his professional gentleness.  The donkey-girl had not ceased to cry out and bless herself, but suddenly, as her care was needed in getting Miss Gerald back to the litter, she became a part of the silence in which the procession made its way slowly into Possana Nuova, Lanfear going on one side, and Mr. Gerald on the other to support his daughter in her place.  There was a sort of muted outcry of the whole population awaiting them at the door of the locanda where they had halted before, and which now had the distinction of offering them shelter in a room especially devoted to the poor young lady, who still remained in her swoon.