s to be remarked
upon were the strange stillness of one who was plainly suffering, and
might well be alarmed, and appearance of expectancy, a dumb appeal;
what he himself calls rather well "an ignorant sort of impatience,
like that of a sick animal."

"Come," Beckwith now said, "let me help you up. You will get cold if
you sit here. Give me your hand, will you?" She neither spoke nor
moved; simply continued to search his eyes. Strap, meantime, was still
trembling and whining. But now, when he stooped yet lower to take her
forcibly by the arms, she shrank back a little way and turned her
head, and he saw to his horror that she had a great open wound in the
side of her neck--from which, however, no blood was issuing. Yet it
was clearly a fresh wound, recently made.

He was greatly shocked. "Good God," he said, "there's been foul play
here," and whipped out his handkerchief. Kneeling, he wound it several
times round her slender throat and knotted it as tightly as he could;
then, without more ado, he took her up in his arms, under the knees
and round the middle, and carried her down the slope to the road. He
describes her as of no weight at all. He says it was "exactly like
carrying an armful of feathers about." "I took her down the hill and
through the hedge at the bottom as if she had been a pillow."

Here it was that he discovered that her wrists were bound together
behind her back with a kind of plait of thongs so intricate that he
was quite unable to release them. He felt his pockets for his knife,
but could not find it, and then recollected suddenly that he should
have a new one with him, the third prize in a whist tournament in
which he had taken part that evening. He found it wrapped in paper in
his overcoat pocket, with it cut the thongs and set the little
creature free. She immediately responded--the first sign of animation
which she had displayed--by throwing both her arms about his body and
clinging to him in an ecstasy. Holding him so that, as he says, he
felt the shuddering go all through her, she suddenly lowered her head
and touched his wrist with her cheek. He says that instead of being
cold to the touch, "like a fish," as she had seemed to be when he
first took her out of the furze, she was now "as warm as a toast, like
a child."

So far he had put her down for "a foreigner," convenient term for
defining something which you do not quite understand. She had none of
his language, evidently; she was unde