So that was why she had kept him!  She had hoped all the time that she could go on presently without his aid, and she realized now that it was impossible.  Insensibly his judgment of her softened, as if his romantic imagination had spun iridescent cobwebs about her.  By Jove, what pluck she had shown, what endurance!  There came to him suddenly the realization that if she had learned to treat a sprained ankle so lightly, it could mean only that her short life had been full of misadventures beside which a sprained ankle appeared trivial.  She could “play the game” so perfectly, he grasped, because she had been obliged either to play it or go under ever since she had been big enough to read the cards in her hand.  To be “a good sport” was perhaps the best lesson that the world had yet taught her.  Though she could not be, he decided, more than eighteen, she had acquired already the gay bravado of the experienced gambler with life.

“Let me help you,” he said eagerly, “I am sure that I can carry you, you are so small.  If you will only let me throw away this confounded bird, I can manage it easily.”

“No, give it to me.  It would die of cold if we left it.”  She stretched out her hand, and in silence he gave her the wounded pigeon.  Her tenderness for the bird, conflicting as it did with his earlier impression of her, both amused and perplexed him.  He couldn’t reconcile her quick compassion with her resentful and mocking attitude toward himself.

At his impulsive offer of help the quiver shook her lips again, and stooping over she did something which appeared to him quite unnecessary to one gray suede shoe.  “No, it isn’t as bad as that.  I don’t need to be carried,” she said.  “That sort of thing went out of fashion ages ago.  If you’ll just let me lean on you until I get up the hill.”

She put her hand through his arm; and while he walked slowly up the hill, he decided that, taken all in all, the present moment was the most embarrassing one through which he had ever lived.  The fugitive gleam, the romantic glamour, had vanished now.  He wondered what it was about her that he had at first found attractive.  It was the spirit of the place, he decided, nothing more.  With every step of the way there closed over him again his natural reserve, his unconquerable diffidence, his instinctive recoil from the eccentric in behaviour.  Conventions were the breath of his young nostrils, and yet he was passing through an atmosphere, without, thank Heaven, his connivance or inclination, where it seemed to him the hardiest convention could not possibly survive.  When the lights of the mansion shone nearer through the bared boughs, he heaved a sigh of relief.

“Have I tired you?” asked the girl in response, and the curious lilting note in her voice made him turn his head and glance at her in sudden suspicion.  Had she really hurt herself, or was she merely indulging some hereditary streak of buffoonery at his expense?  It struck him that she would be capable of such a performance, or of anything else that invited her amazing vivacity.  His one hope was that he might leave her in some obscure corner of the house, and slip away before anybody capable of making a club joke had discovered his presence.  The hidden country was lost now, and with it the perilous thrill of enchantment.