contemplate, and plainly on its “unembarrassed brow Nature had written ‘Gentleman.’”
As this young lady had never had a fair, steady stare at a stunned hero before, she seized her advantage. She had hitherto been distant with the other sex. She had no brother. Not one of her male cousins had ever ventured near enough to get those cousinly privileges that timid cousins sigh for and plucky cousins take, if they are worth taking.
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.”
