“Oh, don’t, don’t speak like that!” said Lily in her distress. She felt she could not at this moment bear the lie. Nobody had ever seen Lily Ramsay so dishevelled before: her hair shaken out by her run, her skirt torn where she had caught her foot in it in her struggles to help Ronald, and covered with the dust of the road. “She would just be that,” said Helen Blythe, receiving the narrative with faith undoubting, “and what a good thing it was you, my dear, that knew the gentleman, and not a strange person! And what a grand thing that you were riding upon Rory! Just lie as quiet as you can; the hot bathing will relieve the pain, and now the boot’s off ye’ll be easier; and the doctor will come in to see you as soon as he comes home. Don’t ye make a movement, sir, that ye can help. Just lie quiet, lie quiet! that is the chief remedy of all.” “He is Mr. Lumsden, Helen,” said Lily, composed, “a friend of my uncle’s, from Edinburgh. Oh, I am glad he is in your hands. He had slipped down the broken arch at the old brig, where all the tourists go; and I had ridden there to-day just to see it.” “Eh, my dear, how thankful you must be,” was all Helen’s reply; but it seemed to Lily that the old minister in his big chair by the fireside gave her a glance which was not so all-believing as Helen’s. “It was just an extraordinary piece of good luck for the young man,” the minister said. “Things seldom happen so pat in real life. But a young lady like you, Miss Lily, likes the part of the good Samaritan.” She could not look him full in the face, and the laugh with which he ended his speech seemed the most cruel of mocking sounds to poor Lily. She put up her hands to her tumbled hair. “May I go to your room and make myself tidy?” she said to Helen. “I had to run most of the way with Rory, and my skirt so long for riding. I don’t know what sort of dreadful person they must have thought me in the town.” “Nobody but will think all the better of you for your kindness,” said Helen, “and we’ll soon mend your skirt, for there’s really little harm done. And I think you should have the gig from the inn to drive you back, my dear, for your nerves are shaken, and the afternoon’s getting late, and you must not stir from here till you have got a good rest and a cup of tea.” “The gig may perhaps take me back to the inn first,” said Ronald, “for it is there I am staying--for the fishing,” he added, unable to keep out of his eyes a half-comic glance at the companion of his trouble. “Indeed, you are going back to no inn,” said Helen; “you are just going to stay at the Manse, where you will be much better attended to; and Lily, my dear, you’ll come and see Mr. Lumsden, that owes so much to you already, and that will help to make him feel at home here.”