"Why, yes, of course!" roused the May Girl, almost instantly. "How silly!—I guess I must have been asleep! And just dreamed it!"
"Why, of course, you were asleep and just dreamed it." Ann Woltor assured her. "You're asleep now! Get back to bed before you catch your death of cold! Or before anybody sees you!"
Ann Woltor, on the verge of hysterics herself, quite naturally was not at all anxious that those dazed, bewildered eyes should clear suddenly and with inevitable questioning upon her own distinctly drenched and most wind-blown and generally dishevelled appearance.
A single little shove of the shoulders had proved enough to herd the May Girl back to her bed-room while she herself had escaped undetected to her own quarters.
But the May Girl had not been satisfied, it appeared, with Ann Woltor's assurances concerning Allan John.
An hour or more later, roused once again to a still somewhat dazed but now unalterable conviction that Allan John had whistled, and fully equipped this time to combat whatever opposition or weather she might meet, she crept from the house out into the storm with the little Pom dog sniffing at her heels. Just what happened afterwards nobody knows. Just how it happened or exactly when it happened, nobody can even guess. Maybe it was the brilliantly lighted bungalow my Husband had fixed for the setting of the "Bunga low Scene" just after Ann Woltor's surreptitious visit that incited her. Maybe to a mind already stricken with feverishness the rising tide did suck through the bungalow rocks with a sound that faintly suggested a rather specially agonized sort of whistle. Who can say? The fact remains that to all intents and purposes she seemed to have ignored the ledge that even yet, in spite of its drenching spray, would have been perfectly safe for another half hour at least, and plunged forth down the blind trail, off the rocks into the water below. Resolutely she refused to cry for help. Perhaps the shock of the cold water chilled the cry in her throat. She grasped the slippery seaweed clinging to the rocks—moaning a little—crying a little—the pitiful struggle setting the Pom dog nearly crazy. How long she clung there she couldn't tell. She was mauled and bruised by the threshing waves. Still some complex inhibition prevented her crying out for help. Ages passed, her bruised arms and numb fingers refused to hold the grip on the elusive seaweed forever and she eventually let go her hold. A receding wave took her and tossed her poor exhausted body still struggling against another ledge of rock well out of reach from shore. Then, for the first time, the May Girl seemed to realize fully her peril—and she shrieked for help.
Ann Woltor, rousing sluggishly from her sleep, heard the black Pom dog barking furiously on the beach. Reluctant at first to leave her snug bed it must have been several minutes at least before sheer curiosity and irritation drove her to get up and peer from the window.
Out of that murky blackness of course not a single outline of the little dog met her sight. Just that incessant yap-yap- yap-yap of a tiny creature almost frenzied with excitement. But what really smote Ann Woltor's startled vision, and for the first time, was the flare of lights, which made the bungalow seem as if ablaze. And as she stared aghast into that flare of light which seemed to point so accusingly at her across the intervening waters, she either sensed or saw the May Girl's unmistakable head and shoulders banging into the single craggy rock that still jutted up from the depths saw an arm reach out heard that one blood-curdling scream!
Rollins must have thought she was mad! Dragging him from his bed, with her arms around his neck, her lips crushed to his ear,—even then she could hardly articulate or make a sound louder than a whisper.
Rollins fortunately did not lose his voice. Rollins bellowed. Rushing out into the hall just as he was, pajamas, nightcap and all, Rollins lifted his voice like a baying hound.