“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Please think of it no more,” answered Richard, “or else I will be sorry too.”

She looked up at him with a curious, interested, puzzled look, which seemed to say, “What a nice smith you are.”

The youth’s manners had a certain, not polish but rhythm which came of, or at least was nourished by, his love of the finer elements in literature. His friendly converse with books, and through them with certain of the dead who still speak, fell in with yet deeper influences, helping to set him in right relation toward humanity. His breed also contributed something. Ancestors innumerable, men and women, all leave their traces in a man, and in Richard the good influences were visible and at work.

His hand kept on bleeding, and he now took a handkerchief from his pocket to bind it with. Instantly the little lady stepped forward. “That cloth is much too black,” she said, and took the handkerchief from his hand. Drawing her own from her pocket, she deftly bound up his wound with it. All of her party looked on in silence. Some of them had seen her the day before tie up the leg of a wounded dog, and had admired her for it, but this was different! She was handling a workman’s hand—black and hard with labour! And it was nothing but a scratch! She was forgetting her station. But they dared say nothing. They knew her and feared what she might say in reply.

“There!” she said. “I hope your hand will be well soon. Goodbye!” She turned and followed her mare, which Simon was leading with caution through the door of the workshop, rather too low for Miss Brown.

Lestrange helped her to the saddle in silence, and before Richard realized she was gone, he heard the merriment of the party mingling with the sound of the horses’ hoofs, as they went swinging down the road. The fairy had set them all laughing already!

The instant they were gone Simon showed a strange concern over the insignificant wound. He felt he had been hasty and unfair to Richard by removing him from the task in the middle of the incident. He now seemed anxious to show, without actual confession, that he knew his voice had an angry tone and that he was sorry for it. He could not have shod the mare better himself, he said. His hand had better not do anything for a day or two. Tomorrow being Saturday, they would have a holiday together.

— Five —

The Library

The next day Simon proposed that they should have a good long walk and a look at Mortgrange. “And then,” he added, “we can ask about the mare and see how her new shoe fits.” They had known Simon there for the last thirty years, he said, and would let them have the run of the place, for sir Wilton and his lady were away from home. Richard had never heard of Mortgrange, but he was ready to go wherever his grandfather pleased.