JOHN A LOVE STORY BY MRS OLIPHANT AUTHOR OF ‘CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD,’ ETC. WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCLXX _ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE_ JOHN. CHAPTER I. I do not know how to begin this story otherwise than by a confession that I cannot describe its very first scene. It was a scene such as happens very often in romance, and which a great many writers could describe to the life. I know who could do it so well that you would think you saw the accident--the plunge of the frightened horse, the sudden change in the sensations of the rider from voluntary progress on her own part to a gradual confused wild mad rush past of trees and houses and hedgerows, and all the whirling level green of the country round--the flash before her eyes--the jar--the stillness of insensibility. Many writers whom I know could make a great point of it; but I never was run away with by my horse, and I do not know how it feels. Therefore I will begin where the excitement ends, and take up my story from the moment when Kate Crediton opened her eyes, without any notion where she was, with a thousand bells ringing in her ears, and awful shadows of something that had happened or was going to happen flitting about her brain--and by degrees found that she was not on her horse, as she had been when last she had any acquaintance with herself, but lying on a sofa with a sense of wetness and coolness about her head, and the strangest incapacity to move or speak or exercise any energy of her own. She began to hear the voices and to feel the things that were being done to her before she was capable of opening her eyes, or indeed had come to herself. There was a soft plash of water, and sensation as if a sudden shower had come over her face, and then consciousness struggled back, and she began to divine what it was.