"Not much," she replied with a nervous laugh as she shook the curiously dry sand from her habit. "My wrist will be a bit black and blue, that's all. Why, Philip, what's the matter? Philip!" He had doubled up limply, horribly, as if he had been shot, and lay in a heap at her feet. "Philip! What is it?" As she slipped her arm beneath him to raise his head, something warm and wet trickled over it,--blood! "The wound," he murmured. "My handkerchief,--anything,--I am sorry." Then the pain died out of his face and his head felt heavy on her arm. The wound! She sought for it by the aid of that ghastly trickle only to find, when she tore the coverings away, that it was no trickle, but an intermittent gushing. That must be stopped somehow,--her handkerchief, his handkerchief, her own little white hands. It had all passed so quickly that it seemed but a minute since he had cried "Pull up," and there she was with his head on her knee, face downwards, and the warm blood soaking over her. People make long stories afterwards of such scenes; but as a matter of fact they derive all their horror from their awful swiftness. Belle, bareheaded in the sunlight, was full of one frantic desire to see the face hidden away in her habit. Was he dead? Was that the reason why the blood oozed slower and slower? She craned over his close-cropped hair only to see the outline of his cheek. "Philip, Philip!" she whispered in his ear; but there was no answer. Was it five minutes, was it ten, was it an hour since she had sat there with her hands?--? Ah, ghastly, ghastly! She could not look at them; and yet for no temptation in the world would she have moved a finger, lest he was not dead and she,--oh, blessed thought!--was staving death aside. A shout behind, and her husband tearing down at a mad gallop, alarmed at the return of the riderless horse. "Good God! Belle! what has happened?" "Look, and tell me if he is dead," she said. "Quick! I want to know,--I want to know!"