With a gasp as the pungent liquid almost strangled me, I opened my eyes to find that the physician's arm was supporting my shoulder and his hand holding the spoon to my lips.
"Oh, thank God, thank God," some one groaned brokenly on the other side of me, and I turned my eyes to meet Dicky's face bent close to mine and working with emotion.
"She is all right now," the physician said, reassuringly. "She will suffer far more from the shock than from any real damage by her immersion. Get her into the tent." He turned to Mrs. Underwood and said: "Rub her down hard, and if there are any extra wraps in the party put them around her. Give her a stiff little dose of this." He handed Lillian the brandy flask. "Then bring her out into the sunshine again. She'll be all right in a little while."
Dicky picked me up in his arms as the physician spoke, as if I had been a child, and strode with me toward the improvised tent Dr. Pettit had indicated.
"Sweetheart, sweetheart, suppose I had lost you," he said brokenly, and then, manlike, reproachfully even in the intensity of his emotion: "What possessed you to go out so far? If it hadn't been for Grace Draper being on hand when you went down, you would never have come back. Harry and I were too far away when Lil screamed to be of any use. But by the time we got there Miss Draper had you by the hair and was towing you in."
My brain was too dazed to comprehend much of what Dicky was saying, but one remark smote on my brain like a sledge hammer.
Grace Draper had saved my life! Why, if I had any memory left at all,
Grace Draper had—
Lillian came forward swiftly and placed a restraining finger on my lips.
"You mustn't talk yet," she admonished; then to Dicky, "Run away now,
Dicky-bird, and give Mrs. Durkee and me a chance to take care of her."
Little Mrs. Durkee's sweet, anxious face was close to Lillian's. "Yes,
Dicky," she echoed, "hurry out now."
Dicky waited long enough to kiss me, a long, lingering, tender kiss that did more to revive me than the brandy, and then went obediently away while Mrs. Durkee and Lillian ministered to me as only tender and efficient women can.