“It’s only a pin scratch; don’t think of it.” He tried to console and reassure her. She began unwinding the soft mull tie she wore. “I know you’ll bleed to death if we can’t stop it.” He had taken his boot off. With tender, trembling fingers she was binding the cloth to his leg, winding it around again and again, trying to wrap out the sight of the blood. It was no use, in a second the red stain would radiate over the white surface. “What shall I do! oh, forgive me, forgive me!” She knelt down and pressed his knee in her arms and bent over it with tears, the incense of her love mingling with self-reproach. Her penitence was pathetic. He regarded her grief with compassionate softness. This came near disarming his resolve. He wanted to take her in his arms as he had never done in his life. As she held the wound close, he resisted the impulse to flinch. “I’m all right, don’t you worry.” He read the line on the boot. “I wouldn’t take anything for that. It will sweeten the absence, and I hope this scratch will make a scar that I may wear all my life to remember you by.” “I’ll never forgive myself for it--never!” “Don’t say that. It’s a little thing after all. See, I walk all right. Let’s go home.” Putting one hand on her shoulder they started off, Esther watching every step he took with fear and alarm. “Are you telling the truth. Don’t it hurt you to walk?” Turning his face away, he bit his lips. “Not much, you know there is always a little soreness, no matter how slight the cut.” He wouldn’t tell that the knee was a very dangerous place to receive a wound. All the way the joint was stiffening and getting more painful. His face beamed in the effort to conceal his suffering. When they reached the steps he leaned his head against a column; he was wearied and felt that he could bear no more. “Come, lie down; I’ll fix the bed for you and find grandpa,” she urged. “No, come back; I’ll sit here on the step awhile. I must be going soon.” Dear little heart, he would never while he lived forget her. “How can you go, hurt as you are?” “Sit down here by me, I have but a few minutes with you. I ordered my horse for five o’clock.” Without further resistance she took the seat. She had not forgotten that his will was the only one she ever met stronger than her own. “Forgive me?” looking up to him, she asked. “Don’t use that word between us.” He gathered her hands in his own, partly for fear she might touch his knee. Soon his horse came around. “Poor cripple,” Esther said with a caressing accent, stretching her hand toward his knee, as he mounted. Then she pressed her hands hard against her eyelids as he said good-bye. When she looked up again he was gone. She stood sighing as if her soul would leave her body, as he rode on at a gallop, outlined against the far blue of the hills. CHAPTER XIII.