as rapidly growing dark under the heavy
branches, so that the winding path could only have been followed by
those well used to it. As it became steeper and more stony the trees
became thinner, and against the eastern sky could be seen, dark and
threatening, the turrets of a castle above a steep, smooth-looking,
grassy slope, one of the hills, in fact, called from their shape by the
French, ballons.

Just then Jean's horse, weary and unused to mountaineering, stumbled.
The man at its head was perhaps not attending to it, for the sudden pull
he gave the rein only precipitated the fall. The horse was up again in a
moment, but Jean lay still. Her sister and the lady were at her side
in a moment; but when they tried to raise her she cried out, at first
inarticulately, then, 'Oh, my arm!' and on another attempt to lift her
she fainted away. The knight was in the meantime swearing in German at
the man who had been leading her, then asking anxiously in French how
it was with the maiden, as she lay with her head on her sister's lap,
Madame answered,

'Hurt--much hurt.'

'But not to the death?'

'Who knows? No thanks to you.' He tendered a flask where only a few
drops of wine remained, growling something or other about the Schelm;
and when Jean's lips had been moistened with it she opened her eyes, but
sobbed with pain, and only entreated to be let alone. This, of course,
was impossible; but with double consternation Eleanor looked up at what,
in the gathering darkness, seemed a perpendicular height. The knight
made them understand that all that could be done was to put the
sufferer on horseback and support her there in the climb upwards, and
he proceeded without further parley to lift her up, not entirely without
heed to her screams and moans, for he emitted such sounds as those with
which he might have soothed his favourite horse, as he placed her on the
back of a stout, little, strong, mountain pony. Eleanor held her there,
and he walked at its head. Madame de Ste. Petronelle would fain have
kept up on the other side, but she had lost her mountain legs, and
could not have got up at all without the mule on which she was replaced.
Eleanor's height enabled her to hold her arm round her sister, and rest
her head on her shoulder, though how she kept on in the dark, dragged
along as it were blindly up and up, she never could afterwards
recollect; but at last pine torches came down to meet them, there was
a tumult of voices, a y