Jacquette had intended to leave Winifred for only a minute, but the discussion held her, and block after block flew past while they sat there arguing. Suddenly, they all realised, with a start, that the car was stopping at their corner. Jacquette sprang to help Winifred, and the other girls followed in a rush, but they were late, and the conductor, either not noticing, or not caring, that Winifred was blindfolded, started the car with a jerk before she was off the step.
She might have fallen, anyway, for her foot had caught in the torn ruffle of the long white petticoat, but, with the sudden start, she lost her balance, pitched forward, plunging through Jacquette’s arms as if they had been paper, and fell, face downward, with her head almost under the wheels of a passing wagon.
There were shouts from the passengers; the car stopped again, and nearly everyone jumped off to crowd around the spot where Winifred lay. Jacquette was down on the ground, trying, with shaking fingers, to untie the bandage that blinded Winifred’s eyes, and shuddering at sight of the blood that flowed from a cut on the poor girl’s cheek. Winifred was not unconscious, for she had groaned when they turned her, and had cried out,
“Oh, my knee! It’s my knee, girls!”
The conductor was blustering about the idiocy of parents who allowed their daughters to do such things, when suddenly, a stout, sandy-whiskered man who had been engrossed with his newspaper in the rear car, came pushing through the crowd, and stopped in blank horror at sight of the grotesque little figure stretched out on the ground.
“Winifred!” he ejaculated, and Winifred—her eyes uncovered, now, her face bruised, her queer little bonnet tumbled off and trampled on, but her dreadful Medusa braids still rampant—reached out her hand to him, and answered piteously,
“Oh, papa! Where did you come from? Were you on this car? Don’t worry, darling! It’s only—my initiation!”
Not one of the girls had ever seen Winifred’s father, and not one of them could think of a person who would have been less welcome at that moment. He paid scant attention to them, however. His orders were quick and sharp, and a carriage was there to take Winifred home sooner than seemed possible. In the meantime, he had been examining her injuries, taking the conductor’s number, and listening, now and then, to a fragment from the jumble of versions offered by the passengers who crowded about.
When he had Winifred safely in the carriage, he turned to Jacquette, whose murmured sympathy and offers of help had gone unheeded.
“I should like your name and address, young lady,” he said, without noticing the other frightened girls who had withdrawn into the background as soon as he appeared, and, when Jacquette had told him who she was, he added, with suppressed indignation, “I will take care of my daughter, now. As for you, I advise you to go on to the initiation you were planning, and tell your society that Winifred Pierce will never become a member of it as long as she has a father to take care of her.”