CHAPTER XXI
AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR
The papers Monday evening contained an account of a heroic rescue. There was a fancy sketch of a young woman diving from the deck of a pleasure yacht to save a child who with uplifted arms was drowning in the most dramatic manner imaginable. Elaine saw the sketch over the shoulder of the man who occupied the seat in front of her in the street car, and it was not till she reached home that she discovered that the theatrical young heroine was supposed to represent herself.
Along the Terrace they had found it out long before and each of the girls had made a beeline for the Marshall home with a paper under her arm. Peggy was the first arrival, with Amy a close second, while Ruth and Priscilla reached the door at the same minute. What with the rustling of papers, and the chorus of voices all explaining at once, Mrs. Marshall conceived the idea that something dreadful had happened, and it was necessary to produce the smelling-salts before she was equal to hearing the account.
The story had been written up with high regard for picturesqueness. The Dunn family had multiplied into a car-load of ragged children and the five Terrace girls had become wealthy young women who devoted a large share of their leisure to philanthropy. Upon Elaine, as the heroine of the occasion, adjectives were lavished with the generosity characteristic of newspaper reporters when they start out to be complimentary. Mrs. Marshall gradually lost her look of apprehension as she listened, and her face took on a motherly pride, which obliterated, for the time, its habitual expression of fretful weakness.
When Elaine arrived there was a rush in her direction. Four newspapers were shaken in her face. Four voices, each uplifted in the laudable effort to drown out the other three, read the most thrilling of the head-lines. Elaine stared incredulously at the heroine with the dishevelled hair, on the point of plunging from the deck of the yacht into tossing waves below. At last the truth dawned upon her.
"You don't mean, girls," she gasped, "you can't mean that it is intended for--me. O, it can't be possible."
In chorus four voices read, "The heroine of the occasion is Miss Elaine Marshall, 2618 Friendly Terrace." Further disclosures were checked by Elaine's putting her hands over her ears.
"All that in the paper about me? How perfectly dreadful! How in the world could they have found out about it?"
Ruth looked a little guilty. On her arrival home Saturday night, she had painted Elaine's exploit in glowing colors, and Graham's friend, Jack Rynson, was a reporter on the Star. Fortunately Elaine did not notice the incriminating color in Ruth's cheeks, and Peggy was saying consolingly, "Why, I think it's splendid. Just listen, Elaine! 'Seeing the peril of the child, the intrepid young woman, with a magnificent disregard for her own peril--'"