In the semi-darkness, however, the girls saw a large object looming above the porch roof, and it again struck against the hotel. It was a light cottage that had been raised from its foundation and swept by the current against the larger building.
Again it crashed into the corner of the hotel. The roof of the porch was wrecked at this corner by the heavy blow. Windows crashed and servants began to scream. Ruth clutched Helen and drew her back against the wall as the chimney-bricks of the drifting cottage fell through the broken roof of the veranda.
CHAPTER XVII—THE FLOOD RISES
There was a doorway near at hand—the floor of the house being one step higher than the porch which was now flooded. Ruth was just about to drag her chum into this doorway when a figure plunged out of it—a thin, graceless figure in a rain-garment of some kind—and little else, as it proved.
“Oh! oh! oh!” screamed the stranger as she spattered into the water in her slippered feet. “I am killed! I am drowned!”
Helen began actually to giggle. It did not seem so tragic to her that the hotel on the island should become suddenly surrounded by water, or be battered by drifting buildings which the flood had uprooted. The surprise and fright the woman expressed as she halted on the porch, was calculated to arouse one’s laughter.
“Oh, oh, oh!” said the woman, more feebly.
“Come right back into the house—do!” cried Ruth. “You won’t get wet there.”
“But the house is falling down!” gasped the woman, and as she turned the lamplight from the hall revealed her features, and Helen uttered a stifled cry.
She recognized the woman’s face. So did Ruth, and amazement possessed both the girls. There was no mistaking the features of the irritable, nervous teacher from New England, Miss Miggs!