She was wholly unversed in illness, un-acquainted with death, but in the novels she had read episodes of fainting had been freely scattered, and they had left a general idea in her mind. With shaking fingers, shaking from her recent struggle and the impact of this latest shock, she unfastened Hugh’s hunting-tie and the neck of his shirt, while her sinking heart told her of her own ignorance and loneliness, and the white face remained unmoved. It seemed to have become smaller, and the temples hollow and blue. She took off the glove from the heavy, listless hand, and tried with her unskilled fingers to feel the pulse. It was just perceptible, and at the contact with that thread of life shut up inside the intolerable mystery of unconsciousness, the fear, the paralyzing helplessness began to give way. Something like the clinking of a tin can came to her ear, and she started up. Two little girls, with red petticoats over their heads, were crossing the field, and Lady Susan ran towards them, calling with what voice she could muster. At sight of the dishevelled vision in top-boots and a man’s hat emerging from the mist, the children seemed disposed to fly, but finally came to her. Her heart sank as she saw their hesitating, timorous faces. Could she make them understand? To every request they returned the same whispered “We will, miss,” with their lovely eyes cast down in shyness, but half-a-crown and a glimpse of the figure lying by the fence quickened their sense of the seriousness of the matter. They were taking their father’s dinner to where he was working on the line, they would run on to Letter Kyle with a note to the doctor, they would send people to help. Their nimble red feet seemed to promise speed; Lady Susan snatched out her pencil-case, but on what was the note to be written? It came to her like a flash that she had seen Hugh put a letter into his breast-pocket before he started; the inside of the envelope would do. She went back to him, and with a shrinking hand moved the inert form and found the letter. As she took it out of the envelope she saw her own name and that of Glasgow; and in one blinding moment read the sentence that connected them. There was a pause. She looked up and saw the innocent and awe-struck eyes of the children fixed on her as they stood, too frightened to come near the prostrate figure in the red coat. She put the letter into her own pocket, and opening out the envelope wrote on it her demand for help, for a doctor, for a carriage from French’s Court. The final “We will, miss,” was murmured, the red legs carried the children down the hill at full speed, till the rhythmic clanking of the milk-can died away.