“Papa! papa! there is an accident on the line!” cried Miss Fordyce, running into her father's study, where he sat surrounded with books. “I saw it from the door!”

 

“Hush!” returned the old man, and listened. “I hear the train going on,” he said, after a moment.

 

“Part of it is come to grief, I am certain,” answered his daughter. “I saw something fall.”

 

“Well, my dear?”

 

“What shall we do?”

 

“What would you have us do?” rejoined her father, without a movement toward rising. “It is too far off for us to be of any use.”

 

“We ought to go and see.”

 

“I am not fond of such seeing, Alexa, and will not go out of my way for it. The misery¹ I can not avoid is enough for me.”

 

But Alexa was out of the room, and in a moment more was running, in as straight a line as she could keep, across the heath to the low embankment. Andrew caught sight of her running. He could not see the line, but convinced that something was the matter, turned and ran in the same direction.

 

It was a hard and long run for Alexa, over such ground. Troubled at her father's indifference², she ran the faster—too fast for thinking, but not too fast for the thoughts that came of themselves. What had come to her father? Their house was the nearest! She could not shut out the conviction that, since succeeding to the property, he had been growing less and less neighborly.

 

She had caught up a bottle of brandy, which impeded³ her running. Yet she made good speed, her dress gathered high in the other hand. Her long dark hair broken loose and flying in the wind, her assumed dignity forgotten, and only the woman awake, she ran like a deer over the heather, and in little more than a quarter of an hour, though it was a long moor-mile, reached the embankment, flushed and panting.

 

Some of the carriages had rolled down, and the rails were a wreck⁴. But the engine and half the train had kept on: neither driver nor stoker was hurt, and they were hurrying to fetch help from the next station. At the foot of the bank lay George Crawford insensible, with the guard of the train doing what he could to bring him to consciousness. He was on his back, pale as death, with no motion and scare a sign of life.

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