“They heard the train coming up behind them, and Lavinia looked round to see how near it was, and saw the child on the line.” “Whose child was it?” asks Mrs. Prince, with an irrelevant curiosity which jars--if anything can still jar upon nerves so strung and tense--on her hearer. “It was the pointsman, George Bates’s. The mother had run in next door to speak to a neighbour, and left it alone in the house!” “It is a scandal that such a thing should be allowed! A child of two left alone in a house!” Mrs. Darcy acquiesces, faintly conscious that the unescapable worst of her story is still ahead. “And then?” “Then they both set off running back as hard as they could to try and reach it in time.” “Yes, yes?” rather breathlessly. “Lavinia stumbled and fell.” “How very unlike her!” “But Rupert ran on.” “Yes?” It is hard to be pulled up so near the _dénouement_, as Mrs. Prince feels, but yet it is evident to even her not very acute perceptions that, for the moment, whip and spur are useless. Yet, after what is in reality a very short interval, the tale is taken firmly up again. “He got up just in time, snatched the child, and threw it safely on to the grass. “Yes, yes? Oh, _please_ go on!” “But then--then”--will she ever be able to get through it? and this is only the first time out of hundreds that she will have to repeat it--“he seemed to lose his head; he stood for half a second right in front of the engine, and one of the buffers knocked him down, and the whole train went over him!” It is done! She has got it over; but of course there will follow a flood of questions and comments. Mrs. Darcy has not long to wait. After the strong shudder that the dreadful narrative provokes comes a train of horrified curiosities as to detail. “Was he--they told me not, but yet I can’t understand how it could be otherwise--was he terribly mutilated?” Mrs. Darcy puts a thin hand up to her mouth to oblige it to cease twitching. “Not in the least; beyond the injury to his head, from which he has been unconscious ever since, and a slight wound in the right leg, there was not a scratch upon him.” “How miraculous!” “The train was going quite slowly.” “Then his life might have been saved--he might have got off scot-free, if he had not lost his head?” “Yes; if he had not lost his head.” Oh, is not it nearly ended? how much longer will it continue? There is a respite of a few moments; but when Mrs. Prince’s next sentence appears it is in the nature of a comment that makes her companion regret the questions that have preceded it. “In any other case one would have said that it looked almost like _suicide_; but, of course, in his, that is absolutely out of the question.” “Absolutely!” “How did you hear the details?--not from Lavinia?” “My husband went down to Rivers Sutton Station last night, after--after Rupert had been brought home, and saw the engine-driver and fireman.”