“He’s dead, sir,” she heard a voice say.  “I’ll open the gate for the lady.”

And then a garden gate a few yards off was opened inward, and Molly walked to meet the man whom she supposed to be a head gardener.  She thanked him and went through the gate, to find Edmund, with a very white face, leaning back on a stone bench built into the wall.

“The gentleman strained himself a bit,” said the gardener, in a tone of apology to Molly.  “I can’t think how he come to break his chain”—­he meant the dog this time.  “I’ve said he ought to be shot long ago; now they’ll believe me.  Why, he bit off the porter’s ear at the station when he first come, and he was half mad with rage to-day.”

“I’m all right,” said Edmund, with a kindly smile to the horribly distressed Molly.  She went up to him with a gentle, tender anxiety on her face that betrayed a too strong feeling, only he was just faint enough not to notice it.

“It’s nothing, child,” he said in the fatherly tone that to Molly meant so far too much.  “The merest rick.  I forgot, in the hurry, to think how high I was lifting you, and I also forgot that there might be cucumber frames on the other side!”

“I wouldn’t have said ‘over the garden wall,’ sir, if there had been,” said the gardener with a smile, as he offered a glass of water that had been fetched by the other man, whose coat and gaiters proclaimed him unmistakably a keeper.

“A fine dog, poor fellow,” said Edmund to the latter.

The keeper shook his head.  “I don’t deny it, sir, but there are fine lions and fine bears, too, sir, that are kept locked up in the Zooelogical Gardens.”  Evidently the gardener and the keeper were of one opinion in this matter.

Presently Sir Edmund was so clearly all right that the men, after being tipped and having all their further offers of help refused, went away.

Edmund and Molly were left alone.

“How well you run!” he said, smiling.

“Yes; even without a ferocious dog behind me I can run fairly well,” she said.  “But I wish you had let me get over that wall alone.  And I wish they could have spared that splendid animal.”

“After all, he would have been shot whether we had been there or not,” said Edmund.  “My only bad moment was listening for the crash of broken glass and thinking that you were cut to pieces.”

“You are sure that you have not hurt yourself?” Her grey eyes were large with anxiety.

Edmund, laughing, held up his hand, which was bleeding.

“I see I have sustained a serious injury of which I was not aware in the excitement of the crisis.”

Molly examined his hand with a professional air.  Edmund let her wash it with her handkerchief dipped in the glass of water, and bind it with his own.  Her touch was light and skilful, and it would have been absurd to refuse to let her do it.  But, as holding his wrist she raised it a little higher to turn her bandage under it, her small, lithe, thin hand was close to his face, and he gave it the slightest kiss.