s to the
photograph she had found of him at Kynaston long ago, and what a
well-made man he was, and how brave and handsome he looked in his
hunting gear.

"How have you managed to hurt your wrist? Let me see it."

"I wrenched it somehow in jumping down; but I don't think that it can be
sprained, for I find I can move it now a little; it is only bruised, but
it hurts me horribly."

She turned back her cuff and held out the injured hand to him. Maurice
stooped over it. There was a moment's silence, the two horses stood
waiting patiently by, the solitary fields lay bare and lifeless on every
side of them, the little birch-trees rustled mysteriously overhead, the
leaden sky, with its chill curtain of unbroken gray cloud, spread
monotonously above them; there was no living thing in all the winter
landscape besides to listen or to watch them.

Suddenly Maurice Kynaston caught the hand that he held to his lips, and
pressed half a dozen passionate kisses upon its outstretched palm.

It was the work of half a minute, and in the next Maurice felt as if he
should die of shame and remorse.

"For God's sake, forgive me!" he cried, brokenly. "I am a brute--I forgot
myself--I must be mad, I think; for Heaven's sake tell me that I have not
offended you past forgiveness, Vera!"

His pulses were beating wildly, his face was flushed, the hands that
still held hers shook with a nameless emotion; he looked imploringly into
her face, as if to read his sentence in her eyes, but what he saw there
arrested the torrent of repentance and regret that was upon his lips.

Upon Vera's face there was no flush either of shame or anger. No storm
of indignation, no passion of insulted feeling; only eyes wide open and
terror-stricken, that met his with the unspeakable horror that one sees
sometimes in those of a hunted animal. She was pale as death. Then
suddenly the colour flushed hotly back into her face; she averted her
eyes.

"Let me go home," she said, in a faint voice; "help me to get on to my
horse, Maurice."

There was neither resentment nor anger in her voice, only a great
weariness.

He obeyed her in silence. Possibly he felt that he had stood for one
instant upon the verge of a precipice, and that miraculously her face had
saved him, he knew not how, where words would only have dragged him down
to unutterable ruin.

What had it been that had thus saved him? What was the meaning of that
terror that had been written in her lovely