Even the first glance could certify that Solomon had met his death in an instant. He lay in a heap in the obscurity forty feet below, on loose rocks among dark water; his head was doubled under his chest at an impossible angle that told the tale of a broken neck. The uttermost effort of a good horse had not been enough to save him, when he had tried to jump out from the top of the high bank across a chasm nearly twenty feet wide. That endeavour and all his simple and gallant life seemed expressed in the wreck of strength and intelligence that lay below, with the water washing over the flap of the saddle, over the shapely brown fetlocks, over the thin and glossy mane. It was mysterious water, an underground stream that slid out of the dumb and sightless caverns of the rock, and passed away into them again with a swirl, a stealthy swift thing, escaping always from the eye of day, and eating the foundations of the limestone walls that sheltered it. Lady Susan still held the hand that had rescued her; it led her through the brush-wood to open ground, till the short wet grass was under her feet and the mist blew in her face. She turned her head away, and the sobs broke from her. Any one who has loved horse or dog will know how and where they touch the heart and command the tear. Let us trust that in some degree it is known to them also, that the confiding spirit may understand that its god can grieve for it. Maria Quin looked at Lady Susan with eyes that were as dry as glass. The Irish peasant regards the sorrow for a mere animal as a childishness that is almost sinful, a tempting of ill fate in its parody of the grief rightly due only to what is described as “a Christhian”; and Maria’s heart glowed with the unwept wrongs of her brother. “What happened him?” she asked, and the knot of pain and outrage was tight in her voice. “I tried to pull him back when I saw what was coming,” said Lady Susan, with difficulty. “I couldn’t stop him; he had too much way on. I only did harm. I think he would have got across only for that.” She stopped and gulped down the sob. It was dreadful to her to cry before an inferior. “He all but got over, but he dropped his hind legs into it and fell back. I somehow caught those branches just as he was going, and he dropped away from under me, and I hung there. I couldn’t climb up. Then you came.” She recovered herself a little, and turned towards her rescuer. “I haven’t thanked you yet. It was awfully good and plucky of you.” Their eyes met, and it seemed as if till then Lady Susan had not recognized Maria Quin. She visibly flinched, and her flushed face became a deeper red, while the hand that had begun to feel for her purse came out of her pocket empty. “Little ye cried yestherday whin ye seen my brother thrown out on the ground by the pool,” said Maria, with irrepressible savageness, “you that’s breakin’ yer heart afther yer horse.”