d. "Let _me_," she said, vivaciously. "Do!
I'm good at wounds. Come over here. No--stay there. I'll come over to
you."

She did, bestriding the back of the middle seat and dropping at his
side. The magnetic fingers again touched his; he felt her warm breath
on his neck as she bent toward him.

"It's nothing," he said, hastily, more agitated by the treatment than
the wound.

"Give me your flask," she responded, without heeding. A stinging
sensation as she bathed the edges of the cut with the spirit brought
him back to common sense again. "There," she said, skillfully
extemporizing a bandage from her handkerchief and a compress from his
cravat. "Now, button your coat over your chest, so, and don't take
cold." She insisted upon buttoning it for him; greater even than the
feminine delight in a man's strength is the ministration to his
weakness. Yet, when this was finished, she drew a little away from him
in some embarrassment--an embarrassment she wondered at, as his skin
was finer, his touch gentler, his clothes cleaner, and--not to put too
fine a point upon it--he exhaled an atmosphere much sweeter than
belonged to most of the men her boyish habits had brought her in
contact with--not excepting her own father. Later she even exempted her
mother from the possession of this divine effluence. After a moment she
asked, suddenly, "What are you going to do with Hornsby?"

Cass had not thought of him. His short-lived rage was past with the
occasion that provoked it. Without any fear of his adversary, he would
have been content quite willing to meet him no more. He only said,
"That will depend upon him."

"Oh, you won't hear from him again," said she, confidently; "but you
really ought to get up a little more muscle. You've no more than a
girl." She stopped, a little confused.

"What shall I do with your handkerchief?" asked the uneasy Cass,
anxious to change the subject.

"Oh, keep it, if you want to; only don't show it to everybody as you
did that ring you found." Seeing signs of distress in his face, she
added: "Of course that was all nonsense. If you had cared so much for
the ring you couldn't have talked about it, or shown it; could you?"

It relieved him to think that this might be true; he certainly had not
looked at it in that light before.

"But did you really find it?" she asked, with sudden gravity. "Really,
now?"

"Yes."

"And there was no real May in the case?"

"Not that I know of," laughed Cass, se