Miss Groome felt that, having borne so much, it was better for them to bear a little more, and be carried to where they could have more comfort. She issued a few crisp orders. The girls, still in their wet clothes, ran to obey. Then, while the Fourth dived into their tents to dress with all the speed of which they were capable, the Sixth in their wet garments loaded Miss Ball, Dorothy, and Cissie on to three trucks which were standing under the wall of the lifeboat house, and harnessing themselves to them, started at a brisk pace for the school. They had no dry clothes on the shore to change into, and so it was wisdom to move—and to move as quickly as they could. The woman from the lock-house had lent them blankets to cover the half-drowned ones; on to these blankets they spread skirts; then each girl wrapping her own skirt round her, they set off from the shore at the best pace they could make.
Dorothy was bumped along on that fearful hand-truck. She felt she could not bear much of such transport, and yet knew very well that she had no strength to walk. She was so tired—so fearfully weary—that she simply could not bear anything more.
When she had been in such danger of drowning, dragged down by Cissie’s frenzied clasp of her shoulders, it had seemed such deep peace and rest, she had not even wanted to struggle. Then had come the confusion of Miss Mordaunt’s rough grip, and the girls dragging her here and pulling her there as they passed her along. Then had come the moment when she was hauled to safety up the steep shingly beach. How the stones had hurt her as she lay! Yet even that was as nothing to this. At least she had been able to lie still on the stones, but now the life was being bumped out of her! She could certainly stand no more! She must shriek—she must do something to show how intolerable it all was——
“Why, Dorothy, it looks as if you had been getting it rough. Have you been competing for a medal from the Humane Society, or just doing a swimming stunt off your own bat?”
Dorothy opened her eyes with a little cry of sheer rapture. “Oh, Daddy, Daddy, I had forgotten you were here! I can’t bear this old truck one minute longer—I can’t, oh, I can’t!” she wailed.
Dr. Sedgewick had been warned by the girl who had run on ahead of the procession to tell matron of what was coming, and he had met the girls and the hand-trucks down the lane a little beyond the school grounds. He gave a rapid glance round to size up the possibilities of the situation. Catching sight of the little gate into the grounds which would cut off a big piece of the way, he called to them to open it, and stooping down, he lifted Dorothy from the truck, swinging her over his shoulder.
“Guide me by the shortest way to the san,” he said to the nearest girl; and while she ran on ahead of him, he followed after her, carrying Dorothy.
“I am so heavy, you will never manage it,” she protested, yet half-heartedly, for it was such a delightful change to be borne along like this after that awful bumping on the truck.
“I think I shall be able to hold out,” he answered, laughing at her distress, and then he passed in at the door of the san, where the matron met him, and showed him where to carry Dorothy.
The hours after that were a confusion of pain and weariness, a succession of deep sleeps and sudden, startled wakings. Then presently Dorothy came out of a bad dream of being dragged down to the bottom of the sea by Cissie, and awoke to find a light burning, and her father sitting in an easy-chair near her bed, absorbed in a paper—or was it a book?