Bob, with an exclamation of alarm, dropped to her side and passed his arm back of her shoulders.  As she felt the presence of his support, she let slip the last desperate holdings of physical command, and leaned back gratefully, breathing hard, her eyes still closed.

After a moment she opened them long enough to smile palely at the anxious face of the young man.

“It’s all right,” she said.  “I’m all right.  Don’t be alarmed.  Just let me rest a minute.  I’ll be all right.”

She closed her eyes again.  Bob, watching, saw the colour gradually flowing up under her skin, and was reassured.

The girl lay against his arm limply.  At first he was concerned merely with the supporting of the slight burden; careful to hold her as comfortably as possible.  Then the warmth of her body penetrated to his arm.  A new emotion invaded him, feeble in the beginning, but gaining strength from instant to instant.  It mounted his breast as a tide would mount, until it had shortened his breath, set his heart to thumping dully, choked his throat.  He looked down at her with troubled eyes, following the curve of her upturned face, the long line of her throat exposed by the backward thrown position of her head, the swell of her breast under the thin gown.  The helplessness of the pose caught at Bob’s heart.  For the first time Amy—­the vivid, self-reliant, capable, laughing Amy—­appealed to him as a being demanding protection, as a woman with a woman’s instinctive craving for cherishing, as a delicious, soft, feminine creature, calling forth the tendernesses of a man’s heart.  In the normal world of everyday association this side of her had never been revealed, never suspected; yet now, here, it rose up to throw into insignificance all the other qualities of the girl he had known.  Bob spared a swift thought of gratitude to the chance that had revealed to him this unguessed, intimate phase of womanhood.

And then the insight with which the significant moment had endowed him leaped to the simple comprehension of another thought—­that this revelation of intimacy, of the woman-appeal lying unguessed beneath the comradeship of everyday life, was after all only a matter of chance.  It had been revealed to him by the accident of a moment’s faintness, by which the conscious will of the girl had been driven back from the defences.  In a short time it would be over.  She would resume her ordinary demeanour, her ordinary interest, her ordinary bright, cheerful, attractive, matter-of-fact, efficient self.  Everything would be as before.  But—­and here Bob’s breath came quickest—­in the great goodness of the world lay another possibility; that sometime, at the call of some one person, for that one and no other, this inner beautiful soul of the feminine appeal would come forth freely, consciously, willingly.

Amy opened her eyes, sat up, shook herself slightly, and laughed.

“I’m all right now,” she told Bob, “and certainly very much ashamed.”