in the act of turning.
She gazed down on me as if to ask how much I had heard: but almost on
the instant motioned to the old man to come close.

'Have you a sponge?' she asked.

'It is in the pan, my lady.'

She took it, rinsed it twice or thrice to make sure the water was not
too hot, and fell to bathing my wound. Her hand was exquisitely
light; the sense of the warm water delicious; and again I closed my
eyes. But in this exchange of glances my previous image of her had
somehow faded or been transformed, and with a suddenness that to this
day I cannot account for. To be sure I had formed it in haste and
amid the distractions of a pretty sharp combat. On the way to the
house she had kept well ahead--and drawn rein but to converse with me
for less than half a minute. Only once--as she came riding back
across the bridge from her parley with the patrol--had I taken stock
(as you might say) of her looks; and, even so, my eyes had been
occupied with her scarlet habit and feather, her bearing, her seat in
the saddle, and the tone in which she spoke her commands, rather than
with her actual features. That these were handsome I had certainly
noted: but that I had noted them more particularly at the time I only
discovered now, and by contrast.

Here, too, I should say that my age was forty-five and a trifle
over; and that all my life I have been (as my comrades have often
assured me) strangely insensible to the charms of women and
indifferent to their good looks; and I tell this not because I am
proud of it--for Heaven knows I am not--but that the reader may put
no misconstruction, even a passing one, upon the rest of my story.
I never for a moment stood in danger of loving Lady Glynn, as she
never for a moment stood in danger of liking me. But I pitied her;
and by virtue of this pity I was able to do for an hour or two what I
had never done before and have never since tried or wished or cared
to do again--to see clearly into a woman's mind.

But this came later. For the present, lying there while she sponged
my wound, I saw only that she was a great deal younger than I had
deemed; and not only young but in distress; and not only distressed
but in some sort helpless. In short, here was a woman so unlike the
termagant who had charged across the bridge that I could hardly
reconcile the two or believe them to be one.

The sponging over, the old man Pascoe handed her a bandage and, at a
sign from her, lifted my sh