Page:Leah Reed--Brenda's summer at Rockley.djvu/203

Rh “Oh, Brenda!” cried Nora, who had now come up to her, “how you frightened me! I thought surely you’d break your ankle, if nothing worse. How do you feel?’’

“Oh, I’m all right,” said Brenda, shaking out her skirts. “If my brake had worked I—”

Then she stopped in the middle of her sentence. For the first time she had a chance to see the face of the man who had prevented the accident.

“I can’t tell you how much obliged I am,” she continued, still looking at him with much curiosity.

“You ought to take his name and address,” whispered Nora, “so that your father could reward him in some way. It’s really like saving your life. You might have had a dreadful time if you’d struck against that stone wall.”

In the pocket of her skirt Brenda found a little notebook, and, detaching a leaf, she wrote her father’s name and address on it.

“Oh, no, Miss, no reward at all, nothing like it,” the man spoke English, although with an accent; “but if  Miss would give me one of those pictures, the one with  my little boy in it. He die last week, and we have no picture of him.”

The man looked very sad indeed as he spoke.

“There,” said Brenda, “that’s where I saw you, on the Fourth; you remember,” turning to Nora, “that I took some pictures of a man with his boy. I have been wondering where I had seen him. Now it all comes back to me.”