"No. He hass just fainted. You are not to talk!" "And Donald Roy----?" The imperious little hand slipped down to cover my mouth, and Kenneth Montagu kissed it where it lay. For a minute she did not lift the hand, what time I lay in a dream of warm happiness. A chuckle from the opposite seat aroused me. The eyes in the colourless face had opened, and Volney sat looking at us with an ironic smile. "I must have fallen asleep--and before a lady. A thousand apologies! And for awaking so inopportunely, ten thousand more!" He changed his position that he might look the easier at her, a half-humorous admiration in his eyes. "Sweet, you beggar my vocabulary. As the goddess of healing you are divine." The flush of alarmed maiden modesty flooded her cheek. "You are to lie still, else the wound will break out again," she said sharply. "Faith, it has broken out," he feebly laughed, pretending to misunderstand. Then, "Oh, you mean the sword cut. 'Twould never open after it has been dressed by so fair a leech." The girl looked studiously out of the coach window and made no answer. Now, weak as I was--in pain and near to death, my head on her lap with her dear hand to cool my fevered brow--yet was I fool enough to grow insanely jealous that she had used her kerchief to bind his wound. His pale, handsome face was so winning and his eyes so beautiful that they thrust me through the heart as his sword had been unable to do. He looked at me with an odd sort of friendliness, the respect one man has for another who has faced death without flinching. "Egad, Montagu, had either of us driven but a finger's breadth to left we had made sure work and saved the doctors a vast deal of pother. I doubt 'twill be all to do over again one day. Where did you learn that mad lunge of yours? I vow 'tis none of Angelo's teaching. No defense would avail against such a fortuitous stroke. Methought I had you speeding to kingdom come, and Lard! you skewered me bravely. 'Slife, 'tis an uncertain world, this! Here we ride back together to the inn and no man can say which of us has more than he can carry." All this with his easy dare-devil smile, though his voice was faint from weakness. An odd compound of virtues and vices this man! I learnt afterwards that he had insisted on my wounds being dressed before he would let them touch him, though he was bleeding greatly. But I had no mind for badinage, and I turned my face from him sullenly. Silence fell till we jolted into the courtyard of "The Jolly Soldier," where Creagh, Macdonald, and Hamish Gorm, having dismounted from their horses, waited to carry us into the house. We were got to bed at once, and our wounds looked to more carefully. By an odd chance Volney and I were put in the same room, the inn being full, and the Macdonald nursed us both, Creagh being for the most part absent in London on business connected with the rising.