Blue Bonnet felt a queer tightening around her heart; she had heard of boys breaking their necks that way. With a few powerful strokes she reached the shallows and felt for Kitty. "Help me girls—quick!" she cried, "she's struck her head on the bottom." She had seized Kitty by this time and held the girl's head above the water, but the body hung limp and heavy in her arms. The girls sprang to help and among them they managed to lift the slight figure to the bank and lay it tenderly on the soft grass. Kitty's face was deathly white, and from a gash on the top of her head a trickling stream was dyeing her bright locks a deeper red.
Blue Bonnet's teeth were chattering. "Go for somebody!" she gasped, and then, as Debby started on the run, she called after her—"That young doctor—bring him!" Then she turned to Sarah: "Here, help me set her up—work her arms—so!"
Dripping as she fled like a frightened water-sprite, Debby burst upon the others as they sat under the magnolia and screamed tragically:
"Come quick—the doctor, everybody! Kitty dove and Blue Bonnet went down after her and she's drowned!"
Then breathless, exhausted, and with her bare feet cut and bleeding from her run over the rough meadow, she fell headlong at Mrs. Clyde's feet.
Uncle Cliff dropped his pipe and ran, followed by the two boys and Abbott, who paused only to catch up his medicine case from the veranda, and then sped like the wind after the others. Mrs. Clyde had turned ghastly white at Debby's cry and had sprung up to follow the men. But the sight of the little messenger lying in a pathetic heap by her chair, stopped her. Hastily summoning Benita she helped carry Debby into the house and put her to bed; and not until a faint tired moan told of returning consciousness, did she yield to her anxiety and hasten to the pool.
With her feet winged by fear she crossed the meadow, ran as she had not run for forty years, and burst upon the group on the bank with a wild cry—"My girl, my girl—where is she?"
At the sound Blue Bonnet sprang up, and running to her grandmother hugged her convulsively. "She isn't dead—only stunned," the girl sobbed in a glad relief.
Mrs. Clyde held her off for a second. "It wasn't you then?" she questioned as if afraid to trust her eyes.
"No, no!" cried Blue Bonnet.