With swift nervous motions she unfastened his coat and bent her ear to his breast.
“’Tis only a faint, maybe shock. In all the world was only Margot, and Margot was lost. Ugh! the hail. See, it is still here—look! water, and—yes, the tea! It was for you—— Ah!”
Her words ended with a sigh of satisfaction as a slight motion stirred the features into which she peered so earnestly, and she raised her master’s head a bit higher. Then his eyes slowly opened and the dazed look gradually gave place to a normal expression.
“Why, Margot! Angelique? What’s happened?”
“Oh! Uncle Hugh! are you hurt? are you ill? I found you here behind the rocks and Angelique says—but I wasn’t hurt at all. I wasn’t out in any storm, didn’t know there had been one, that is, worth minding, till I came home——”
“Like a ghost out of the lake. She was not even dead, not she. And she was singin’ fit to burst her throat while you were—well, maybe, not dead, yourself.”
At this juncture, Tom, the inquisitive, thrust his white head forward into the midst of the group and, in her relief from her first fear, Margot laughed aloud.
“Don’t, Tom! You’re one of the family, of course, and since none of the rest of us will die to please that broken mirror, you may have to! Especially, if there’s a new brood out——”
But here Angelique threw up her free hand with such a gesture of despair that Margot said no more, and her face sobered again, remembering that, even though they were all still alive, there might be suffering untold among her humbler woodland friends. Then, as Mr. Dutton rose, almost unaided, a fresh regret came:
“That there should be a cyclone, right here at home, and I not to see it! See! Look, uncle, look! You can trace its very path, just as we read. Away to the south there is no sign of it, nor on the northeast. It must have swept up to us out of the southeast and taken our island in its track. Oh! I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”