“Pretty bad,” he answered, moodily. “You can’t think how I wish you had not saved me at its expense! Why did you? Why did you?” she asked, with absolute sincerity. Rivers seemed to repent of his lapse into temper, slight as it had been. He said, laughingly, “Well, I must tell you that I thought it over! It was a fearful wrench, of course, but I decided in your favour. Do you blame me?” She resented his not taking her seriously, and replied, gravely, “Yes, I do. I was not worth the drawing to you, I am sure. You should have considered it first of all. Who was it--was it Cæsar--who swam across the Channel with his Commentaries in his mouth?” “He did--something of the kind--but I never heard that he had a woman to look after as well.” “And then--you carried me home?” she went on, in a tone of sentimental reminiscence. “Yes,” he replied, briskly. “One couldn’t have got a carriage down there, and I could hardly have packed you into Farmer Ward’s wheelbarrow!” “Did anyone see you carry me across the fields?” “Mrs. Popham did,” he said, laughing at the recollection. “She even offered to help me! A woman who could hardly lift a fly!” “I must have looked awful!” Mrs. Elles pondered; she had often thought it over. “A wet woman is such an abject object!... And then you carried me up to bed?” “Yes. Mrs. Watson was very anxious to get her son, Jock, to do it--but I thought of Jock and how he would have knocked your head against the banisters at every step, so I insisted on doing it myself.” “And then?” “And then the doctor came, and saw you, and saw me, and told me it was not much--and then I was easier in my mind.” “Then you were anxious about me?” “Very,” he said. “Poor thing, you suffered so; and you were so good about it!” “Was I? I am glad.” She then returned to the subject that was distressing her. “Are you sure you don’t regret the drawing--are not cross with me about it? Isn’t it in that portfolio--what remains of it? Show it me.” “Oh, no, no!” he said, shuddering. But she had reached out for the portfolio that lay near her hand, and, with the wilfulness of illness, insisted on taking out the hopelessly blurred, grey-streaked sheet of paper stretched on a board. There was a hole in the paper, the size of a shilling, just where the sky-line met the cliff. It was utterly ruined, as the merest tyro in art must have realised. “Oh, poor, poor thing! A snag has caught it, too, like my leg,” she moaned. Rivers dabbled furiously away in the glass of water with his fat brush. He was an artist and human. “I wish you would take it away!” he said, sulkily, without looking at it or her. “Where to?” asked Mrs. Elles, almost weeping. “Oh, anywhere--to the devil, if you like.” “I’ll put it in my room, then,” she said, calmly. “I shall like to have it as a memento.” She slyly dropped it behind the sofa until she could carry it upstairs, and he did not seem even to notice what she was doing. * * * * *