Hours passed—ages, aeons—before the dory reached them! Yet my husband says that it way only minutes. By the merciful providence of darkness we were at least spared some of the visual stages of that struggle. Minutes or aeons—there were not even seconds to spare, it proved by the time help actually arrived. Claude Kennilworth had a broken arm, but was at least conscious. The May Girl looked as though she would never be conscious again. Against the ghastly pallor of her skin the brutal bruises loomed like love's last offering of violets. The flexible finger-tips had clawed themselves to pulp and blood.
The village doctor came on the wings of the wind! We telephoned Dr. Brawne, but he was away on a business trip somewhere and could not be located! The rest of the night went by like a brand-new battle for life, but in the full glare of lamp-light this time! By breakfast-time, if one can compute hours so on a morning when nobody eats, Claude Kennilworth was almost himself again. But the May Girl's vitality failed utterly to rally. White as the linen that encompassed her she lay in that dreadful stupor among her pillows. Only once she roused herself to any attempt at speech and even then her words were almost inaudible. "Allan John," she struggled to say. "Was trying—to find him."
"Has she had any shock before this!" puzzled the Doctor. "Any recent calamity? Any special threat of impending illness?"
"She fainted day before yesterday," was all the information anybody could proffer. "She is subject to fainting spells, it seems. Last night Miss Woltor thought she looked a little bit dazed as though with a touch of fever."
"We've got to rouse her some way," said the Doctor.
"Oh, if we could only find Allan John," cried the Bride. "Allan John—and his whistle," she supplemented with almost shamefaced playfulness.
My Husband and George Keets tore off to town in the little car! They raked the streets, the hotels, the telegraph offices, the railroad station, God knows what before they found him. But they did find him. That's all that really matters!
It was ten o'clock at night before they all reached home again. Allan John asked only one question as he crossed the threshold. His forehead was puckered with perplexity.
"Is—everybody—in the world going to die?" he said.
They took him directly to the May Girl's room and put him down in a chair just opposite her bed, with the whistle in his hands. "Spring and Youth and the Pipes of Pan!" But such a sorry Pan! All the youth that was left in him seemed to have been wrung out anew by this latest horror. In the grayness of him, the hopelessness, the pain, he might have been fifty, sixty, himself, instead of the scant twenty-eight or thirty years that he doubtless was. A little bit shakily he lifted the whistle to his lips.