An experienced bicycle teacher once said that no woman ever picked herself up from a fall, without saying that she was not at all hurt.  True to tradition, Phebe staggered to her feet, exclaiming,—­

“Thank you; but I’m not hurt in the least.  I’m so sorry—­”

Then she paused abruptly and stared at the stranger in the gutter.  He lay as he had fallen, his face half buried in the mud and his right arm twisted under him.  More frightened than she had been in all her headlong descent of the hill, she bent over him and tried to turn him as he lay.  Gifford Barrett was an athlete as well as a musician, however, and it took all of Phebe’s strength to stir him ever so slightly.  As she did so, she disclosed a gash where his temple had struck upon a stone, and his right arm swung loosely out from his side.  Phebe McAlister had suddenly found herself in the presence of her first case, and the presence was rather an appalling one.

In any crisis, the mind attacks a side issue.  Phebe rose from her knees, took off the sodden thing which had been her hat, and carefully covered it over her saddle.  Her face, underneath the streaks of mud, was very white, and her lips were unsteady.  Then she pressed her hands over her eyes, bit her lips and gave her shoulders a little shake.  That done, she knelt down in the mud once more and set herself to the task in hand, wondering meanwhile who and what her victim might be.

Obviously he was a gentleman.  His firm, clean-cut lips alone would have settled that point to her satisfaction.  Beyond that, she had no possible clue to his identity.  The situation was a trying one.  The nearest house was a mile away; the rain was still pelting heavily down upon them, and she, Phebe McAlister, was alone in the storm with a perfect stranger whom she had knocked from his bicycle, stunned and perhaps injured for life.  To whom did he belong?  What should she do with him?  If he died, who would be responsible, not for the injury, but for making the funeral arrangements?  For a moment, the unaccustomed tears rushed to her eyes, and, seen through their mist, her victim seemed to be expanding until he filled the whole landscape and surrounded her by dozens, all plastered with mud and begirt with whitened bones.  Then she pulled herself together again.  The stranger’s arm was broken, his forehead bloody.  She must see what she could do for him, then go for help.

There was a long interval when the noise of the rain was interrupted by little groans and exclamations from Phebe, while she tugged and shoved and pried at the man in the road.  He was so very big, so very unconscious, so very determined to lie with his face buried in the mud and meet his end by suffocation.  At last, she drew a long breath, mustered all her strength and gave him one pull which turned him completely over on his back.  As she did so, his eyes opened dully and by degrees gathered expression.  He looked up into her mud-stained face, down at his mud-stained clothes, around at the mud-stained skull which lay close to his side and grinned back at him encouragingly.