The Lady Jane shook a protesting head.
“That was no fault in you, Dorothy. Go on.”
“When I waked up, she was in the water, and she didn’t understand how to get out. She couldn’t swim, you know, but I can. So, course, I just jumped in and caught her. There was a big branch bent down low and I caught hold of that. She caught hold of me, but not both my arms, and so—so—I could pull us both out.”
Dorothy did not add that her arm had been so strained she could not yet use it without pain.
“Oh! thank God for you, my dear!” cried the mother, laying her hand upon Gwendolyn’s shoulder, who had turned toward the wall and lay with her face hidden. “And after that? Somebody said you stripped off your own jacket and wrapped it around her.”
“It wasn’t as nice as hers, but you see she was cold, and I thought she wouldn’t mind for once. I borrowed her bathrobe once and she didn’t like it, and now she’d borrowed my jacket and didn’t like that, I suppose.”
“Like it! Doubtless it helped to save her life, too, or her from pneumonia. Oh! if you hadn’t been there! If—” sobbed the mother.
“But there wasn’t any ‘if,’ Lady Jane; ’cause if I hadn’t seen the falls and made her see them, too, she wouldn’t have been near hand. If she’d gone with the girl she wanted to, nothing at all would have happened. Some way it got mixed up so she had to walk with me and that’s all. Only once we got out of the water onto the ground, I started yelling, and I must have done it terrible loud. Else Mr. Hugh wouldn’t have heard me and followed my yells. He’d gone long past us, hunting with his gun, and he heard me and came hurrying to where the sound was. So he just put his coat around her and made her get up and walk. He had to speak to her real cross before she would, she was so dazed and mis’able. But she did at last, and he knew all those woods by heart. And the directions of them, which way was north, or south, or all ways.
“It was a right smart road he took for roughness, so that sometimes we girls stumbled and fell, but he wouldn’t stop. He kept telling us that, and saying: ‘Only a little further now!’ though it did seem to the end of the world. And by and by we came out of the woods to a level road, and after a time to a little farmhouse. Mr. Hugh made the farmer hitch up his horse mighty quick and wrap us in blankets and drove us home—fast as fast. And, that’s all. I’m sorry Gwendolyn took such a cold and I hope when she gets well she’ll forgive me for going to sleep that time. And, please, Lady Jane, may I go now? Some of the girls are waiting for me, ’cause they want me in the parade.”