“Let us canter,” said Paula. And so the glad young things swept on, life breaking in bubbles around them and rippling away into unfathomable wells of feeling in one of their pure hearts at least. Suddenly a hand seemed to swoop from heaven and dash them both back in dismay. They had reached one of those places where the foot path crosses the equestrian and they had run over and thrown down a little child. “O heaven!” cried Paula leaping from her horse, “I had rather been killed myself.” The groom rode up and she bent anxiously over the child. It was a boy of some seven or eight years, whose misfortune—he was lame, as the little crutch fallen at his side sufficiently denoted—made appear much younger. He had been struck on his arm and was moaning with pain, but did not seem to be otherwise hurt. “Are you alone?” cried Paula, lifting his head on her arm and glancing hurriedly about. The little fellow raised his heavy lids and for a moment stared into her face with eyes so deeply blue and beautiful they almost startled her, then with an effort pointed down the path, saying, “Dad’s over there in the long tunnel talking to some one. Tell him I got hurt. I want Dad.” She gently lifted him to his feet and led him out of the road into the apparently deserted path where she made him sit down. “I am going to find his father,” said Paula to Cicely, “I will be back in a moment.” “But wait; you shall not go alone,” authoritatively exclaimed that little damsel, leaping in her turn to the ground. “Where does he say his father is?” “In the tunnel, by which I suppose he means that long passage under the bridge over there.” Holding up the skirts of their riding-habits in their trembling right hands, they hurried forward. Suddenly they both paused. A woman had crossed their path; a woman whom to look at but once was to remember with ghastly shrinking for a lifetime. She was wrapped in a long and ragged cloak, and her eyes, startling in their blackness, were fixed upon the pain-drawn countenance of the poor little hurt boy behind them, with a gleam whose feverish hatred and deep malignant enjoyment of his very evident sufferings, was like a revelation from the lowest pit to the two innocent-minded girls hastening forward on their errand of mercy. “Is he much hurt?” gasped the woman in an ineffectual effort to conceal the evil nature of her interest. “Do you think he will die?” with a shrill lingering emphasis on the last word as if she longed to roll it like a sweet morsel under her tongue. “Who are you?” asked Cicely, shrinking to one side with dilated eyes fixed on the woman’s hardened countenance and the white, too white hand with which she had pointed as she spoke of the child. “Are you his mother?” queried Paula, paling at the thought but keeping her ground with an air of unconscious authority.