She was lying on her bed at the “Heather Bell,” with only a very confused recollection of what had happened, and a bandaged foot that hurt dreadfully. A doctor had been sent for from Barnard Castle, so she was told, who had pronounced it only a slight sprain, but the skin of her leg was abraded from knee to instep, and that was the cause of the pain. She could not remember how it had happened--there was a jagged bough, or a snag, she supposed, of the tree that Rivers had held on to, as the flood rushed past them, and which had caught her, somehow, as she slid down in his arms. She was a little light-headed still, and she kept calling out for the artist like a fretful child, and upbraiding him for refusing to come to her. Jane Anne, who was in and out of her room a great deal, treated these appeals sternly, and ministered to her with stony, condemnatory eyes, but Mrs. Watson’s motherly heart was melted by her distress. “Just ye get yerself well, ma honey, and then ye’ll see him! He’s sore put out about ye, sure and that he is, and he’s alway axing me how you’s getting on. But ye must just keep yerself quiet!” Realizing that her only chance of seeing Rivers depended on her recovery, the restless woman put great constraint upon herself, and in a couple of days, was well enough to be carried downstairs and laid on a horsehair sofa in the sitting-room. Her first day downstairs happened to be a hopelessly wet day, and the artist was perforce kept indoors, and painted all day at her side. He was busy, of course, but with extreme unselfishness he offered to read aloud to her. Tears of gratitude came into her eyes as she realised this. “I couldn’t let you,” she said, “but if you would let me talk to you a little, and go on painting--the foreground, or some part that doesn’t matter--?” He smiled, and turned so as to face her. “Don’t let me get absorbed, then, and stray into the middle distance! I can’t promise anything when I have got a brush in my hand.” “Tell me all about the other day,” she said. “You saved my life!” “Which you very foolishly risked to save mine!” She was weak and he unconsciously spoke in the aggressively cheerful, indulgent tone one uses to an invalid. “I was very angry with you indeed for jumping in after me like that. A shout would have done.” “I did call to you, but I could not make you hear.” “Your voice must have been drowned by the rushing of the water. I knew that there was something wrong, though. I looked up from my drawing, and saw the water coming, and you a yard from the bank!” At the sound of the word drawing she gave a little scream--she had quite forgotten it! “I know--I know--the drawing! What became of the drawing?” “Well, you know, I had to have my hands free--” he began, almost apologetically. “Of course! For me! And now I remember seeing you fling it away on to the bank. Was it”--she spoke with bated breath, as one might speak of the fall of empires--“was it quite spoiled?”