"Well, curse it all! I must do something or other, or I'll explode,
I can't sit by and twirl my thumbs while two such women as you
and Miss Burton are in trouble. When a man breaks a girl's heart
I feel like breaking his head."
"Merciful heaven! See—quick—Miss Burton—she's beckoning to you."
Stanton sprang from the piazza at a bound, and was almost instantly at Jennie Burton's side, who sank into a seat near, and gasped:
"Do as I bid—no words—a carriage, and a stout man with yourself—take brandy. Haste, or Mr. Van Berg will die."
"O God! don't say that," Ida sobbed, kneeling at her feet with a low shuddering cry.
Jennie stooped over and kissed her and said: "Courage, Miss Mayhew, all will yet be well. Be your brave self, and you can help me save him. Tell Mr. Burleigh to come here. Have a physician sent for."
Ida almost dragged the bewildered host from his office. Under the inspiration of hope her motions were lithe and swift as a leopard's. Within five minutes after Miss Burton's arrival, a carriage containing herself, Stanton, and two stout men, dashed furiously towards the ravine in which Van Berg was lying, and a buggy was sent with equal rapidity for a physician. Then came to poor Ida the awful suspense and waiting, which is so often woman's part in life's tragedies.
"Oh, can it be," she thought, with thrills of dread and horror, "that he has attempted my crime?" and she grew sick and faint. Then she resolutely put the suspicion away from her as unjust to him. "Will they never return? O God, if they should be too late!"
She stood on the piazza with eyes dilated and strained, in one direction, caring not what any one saw or surmised; but in the increasing excitement, as the rumor spread and grew, she was unnoticed.
At last the carriage appeared, and it was driven so slowly and carefully that it suggested to the poor girl the deliberate and mournful pace of a funeral procession, when all need for haste is past forever, and she sprang down the steps in her intense anxiety, and took some swift steps before she controlled herself. Then pressing her hand on her side, she sank into the seat which Miss Burton had occupied a little before.