Let her not be blamed if her first thought was for herself and her position. Her seven-and-twenty years, her careless and daring flirtations, and her marriage, had not taught her what it was to be in love. She knew that Hugh was in love with her; it was a comfortable knowledge, pleasant and commonplace as sunshine, and she had no more real comprehension of what he might suffer on her behalf than she had of the flames of hell. She thought first of herself, accused in public, accused in private; she put her hands over her face and said she would go away and never come back to French’s Court, where the people spent their time in spying and telling these foul, infernal lies. Hughie would believe her anyhow. She would tell him all about it. It wasn’t so very much, after all, and he wasn’t a bit strait-laced. She took her hands from her face and saw the motionless body flung in the heathery grass, the vacant brow, the strangeness, the terrific pallor. She stood as people stand when the sudden inrush of an idea overwhelms the physical part of them; it had come to her that it might be too late to tell Hughie about it. It sank into her soul, carrying with it the remembrance of her husband standing by the hall door with the letter in his hand. He had read it before he started; he had only spoken to her once afterwards, something about the balance-strap of her saddle, but he had not seemed different. She had noticed that he looked ill, and had presently forgotten all about it. The past flowed in on her; his kindliness, his simpleness, his straightness, most of all, that belief in her that was bound up in the deepest heart of an unjealous nature. The face that lay sideways in the heather began to torture her with its mute reproach; she knelt down beside him, tearless and tense, enduring strong feeling as the undemonstrative must endure it. She bent over him at length, and, as if half afraid, stooped her head and kissed the pale cheek, knowing for the first time the dreadful kiss that is so much to one, so much less than nothing to the other. CHAPTER XIV It was a singular piece of good luck that the two children with the milk-can should have met Dr. Hallahan riding homewards down a lane after an ineffectual search for the hounds. It was also fortunate that it being, so to speak, but the third hour of the day, he was perfectly, almost dismally sober. It was barely a quarter of an hour before he was unfastening Hugh’s waistcoat and feeling him all over, while Lady Susan stood silently by. She had found water in a ditch, and brought it in her hat; she stood motionless, with her fashionable head bare to the mist, and when Dr. Hallahan looked up at her he was aware that a handsomer and more haggardly-set face had never waited for his verdict. “He’s badly hurt, Lady French,” he said, his brogue rough with compassion for her; “he seems to have a couple of ribs broken, and there’s probably concussion too, and it might be a bit of a crush under the horse.”