Page:Lady Barbarity; a romance (IA ladybarbarityrom00snai).pdf/69

 whistle with grave bravado an odd strain from the "Beggar's Opera." Then my merry gentleman turned and looked at me. I also was sitting up in the grass, perhaps a dozen yards away, and was in almost an identical posture to himself, except that mine was a matter of the nerves and shoulder. But if you could have found a more comic pair upon the surface of the earth than we made just then, I should be glad to learn their whereabouts, for to behold them would well repay a pilgrimage.

"Why, bless my soul, my Lady Barbara!" he cries in a tone of deep concern, "do not tell me that you are taken too!"

"I fear I am," says I, with a great desire to swoon, for my shoulder was as hot and wet as possible.

"But not grievously, I hope," says he.

"Sure I do not know," I answered weakly. And sure I didn't! For I felt so utterly foreign at this moment to my usual confident and lively self that I was not certain whether I was really caught at all, or whether I was about to die. The Captain, however, was not to be satisfied with this. With the aid of two hands and one knee he crawled towards me, dragging his shattered member through the grass, as stiffly as a pole, so that it seemed to trail after the remainder of his body in the manner of a wounded snake. When he reached my side, though I think I was very nearly dying for a little sympathy, he compelled me to extend all that I was expending on myself to him. The