Wade's impressive face, though for the moment blind as a statue's, also seized its advantage and stared at her intently, with a pained and pleading look, new to those resolute features.
Wade was entirely unconscious of the great hit he had made by his tumble; plump into the arms of this heroine! There were fellows extant who would have suffered any imaginable amputation, any conceivable mauling, any fling from the apex of anything into the lowest deeps of anywhere, for the honor he was now enjoying.
But all he knew was that his skull was a beehive in an uproar, and that one lobe of his brain was struggling to swarm off. His legs and arms felt as if they belonged to another man, and a very limp one at that. A ton of cast-iron seemed to be pressing his eyelids down, and a trickle of red-hot metal flowed from his cut forehead.
"I shall have to scream," thought the lady, after an instant of anxious waiting, "if he does not revive. I cannot leave him to go for help."
Not a prude, you see. A prude would have had cheap scruples about compromising herself by taking a man in her arms. Not a vulgar person, who would have required the stranger to be properly recommended by somebody who came over in the Mayflower, before she helped him. Not a feeble-minded damsel, who, if she had not fainted, would have fled away, gasping and in tears. No timidity or prudery or underbred doubts about this thorough creature. She knew she was in her right womanly place, and she meant to stay there.
But she began to need help, possibly a lancet, possibly a pocket-pistol, possibly hot blankets, possibly somebody to knead these lifeless lungs and pommel this flaccid body, until circulation was restored.
Just as she was making up her mind to scream, Wade stirred. He began to tingle as if a familiar of the Inquisition were slapping him all over with fine-toothed curry-combs. He became half-conscious of a woman supporting him. In a stammering and intoxicated voice he murmured,--
"Who ran to catch me when I fell, And kissed the place to make it well? My"------
He opened his eyes. It was not his mother; for she was long since deceased. Nor was this non-mother kissing the place.
In fact, abashed at the blind eyes suddenly unclosing so near her, she was on the point of letting her burden drop. When dead men come to life in such a position, and begin to talk about "kissing the place," young ladies, however independent of conventions, may well grow uneasy.