I wiped something that trickled from my face and was shocked to see my hand covered with blood. I looked at myself and saw what seemed to me an astonishing quantity of blood running down my arm and shoulder. I perceived my mouth was full of blood. It’s a queer moment when one realises one is hurt, and perhaps badly hurt, and has still to discover just how far one is hurt. I explored my face carefully and found unfamiliar contours on the left side. The broken end of a branch had driven right through my cheek, damaging my cheek and teeth and gums, and left a splinter of itself stuck, like an explorer’s fartherest-point flag, in the upper maxillary. That and a sprained wrist were all my damage. But I bled as though I had been chopped to pieces, and it seemed to me that my face had been driven in. I can’t describe just the horrible disgust I felt at that. “This blood must be stopped, anyhow,” I said, thickheadedly. “I wonder where there’s a spider’s web”—an odd twist for my mind to take. But it was the only treatment that occurred to me. I must have conceived some idea of going home unaided, because I was thirty yards from the tree before I dropped. Then a kind of black disc appeared in the middle of the world and rushed out to the edge of things and blotted them out. I don’t remember falling down. I fainted from excitement, disgust at my injury and loss of blood, and lay there until Cothope found me. He was the first to find me, scorching as he did over the downland turf, and making a wide course to get the Carnaby plantations at their narrowest. Then presently, while he was trying to apply the methodical teachings of the St. John’s Ambulance classes to a rather abnormal case, Beatrice came galloping through the trees full-tilt, with Lord Carnaby hard behind her, and she was hatless, muddy from a fall, and white as death. “And cool as a cucumber, too,” said Cothope, turning it over in his mind as he told me. (“They never seem quite to have their heads, and never seem quite to lose ’em,” said Cothope, generalising about the sex.) Also he witnessed she acted with remarkable decision. The question was whether I should be taken to the house her step-mother occupied at Bedley Corner, the Carnaby dower house, or down to Carnaby’s place at Easting. Beatrice had no doubt in the matter, for she meant to nurse me. Carnaby didn’t seem to want that to happen. “She _would_ have it wasn’t half so far,” said Cothope. “She faced us out.... “I hate to be faced out of my opinion, so I’ve taken a pedometer over it since. It’s exactly forty-three yards further. “Lord Carnaby looked at her pretty straight,” said Cothope, finishing the picture; “and then he give in.” V