sit up," she said.

I helped her carefully. "Are you all right?" I asked.

She smiled uncertainly. "I think so. I am very dizzy."

My arm was half about her, and for a long moment her head rested against me. Then she sat up very straight and a little apart, busying herself about her dress, giving a practised touch to her hair and the laces at her neck, and smoothing the scarcely ruffled breadths of her skirt.

I gazed out across our meadow to where three black and white cows stood sleepily knee-deep in a small pool. A meadow-lark rose and crossed the field in erratic, wavering flight. A little cloud tempered the brightness and passed.

"What happened?" she asked softly at last.

I pointed to where the trolley lay towering behind her.[Pg 20]

[Pg 20]

She lost color a little and sprang to her feet, then she turned to me laughing.

"I never saw anything look so ashamed of itself in my life," she said. "Speak to it kindly, Mr. Crosby; it can't lie there with its feet in the air for ever."

I shook my head ruefully. "I am afraid that it will have to stay there for the afternoon, at least."

"But how are we—how am I—going to get home? Where are the crew, and wasn't there another passenger?"

I gasped. I had absolutely forgotten the other woman.

She was lying not far from us in a little hollow of the long grass, and for the moment I thought that she was dead. The sallow, foreign face was yellow white, the plump hands were gripped, as if in some past convulsive agony, above her head, and this same muscular rigidity seemed to underlie incongruously every formless line of the flabby body.

Miss Tabor's hand trembled upon my arm. "Do you think that she—that she is dead?" she whispered.

I stooped to the woman's wrist. The pulse came faintly with a dull throb that was unbelievably slow.[Pg 21] But as I still fumbled the pulpy hand caught mine in a grip that made me wince, the bloodless lips stirred in a shuddering moan, and without 

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