The train is coming round the curve. The engine, with its rocking train of carriages, is rounding into sight. Thank God, it has not got up its full steam yet; it is not going nearly at its highest speed. If it were, there would not be a chance. As it is, there is just a possibility. It all depends upon whether she can hold out. Yes, she _will_ hold out, even if she drops down dead the moment afterwards. No, she _can’t_; her powers are going to abandon her just too soon, just when she is within a hundred yards of the object to be rescued. She staggers--recovers herself--runs a couple of yards--staggers again; drops on her knees, and then falls flat--happily half on to the up line. She has just sense enough left to drag herself quite on to it--just sight and hearing enough left to be aware of a hatless figure making the air sing in its mad rush past her to meet the locomotive, before consciousness leaves her. CHAPTER XX “How is he?” “Just the same.” “Not conscious?” “No.” “Never has been?” “Not for a moment.” It is the morning that follows that “serious and it is to be feared fatal accident on the line between Rivers Sutton and Shipston,” to whose occurrence at 7.15 p.m. on the previous evening the _Shipston Weekly Advertiser_ will give a paragraph in its next issue, and the London papers record with greater conciseness, and in smaller type. The interlocutors are exchanging whispered questions and answers in the verandah, Mrs. Prince having risen at an unprecedented hour, and laden her carriage with a pharmacy of drugs to show her neighbourly sympathy; and Mrs. Darcy having spent the night at Campion Place, a vigil to which her appearance lends no improbability. “I do not yet understand quite how it happened.” “Will you mind coming a little farther from the house?” “But I thought you said he was quite unconscious?” “So he is; but _they_ are not.” “To be sure! to be sure! Poor things! poor things!” They tread out stealthily on the sward, where the morning meets them in its still wet splendour of dew and flower. The young sun has flung away the thin rosy scarves that lightly swathed him at his birth, and is magnificently wheeling up the eastern sky. In the shortening shadows the pale green leaves of the late tulips carry little globes of bright moisture upon them, and their gallant deep cups still hold some of the wine of the dawn. “The servants tell me that they were walking along the line. How came they to be walking along the line?” “They were late, and afraid of keeping Sir George waiting. It was the shortest way home.” The rector’s wife pauses, her dead-white face and sunken eyes turning towards the glory-promising mist, through which the trees, fields, oast-houses of the weald, dwindled by distance, are beginning to pierce. Her voice sounds like that of one reciting a lesson, which she knows will have to be infinitely repeated. “And then?”