Suddenly that verdant hope of which it spoke blossomed! It thrilled and rioted through Jessica.
“Oh! perhaps we sha’n’t need a doctor—or the pulmotor. I saw her eyelids quiver. She may not have been three minutes under water.” The timing watch in the girl’s hand shook. “Keep off the other children, Olive—Arline—don’t let them get near, to draw the oxygen from her!”
Yes, slowly the breath of life was wavering back into its dumb tabernacle: through ’Becca’s blue, swollen lips came a slow, uncertain shiver, drawn from the hands working upon her, a quivering gasp.
“Oh! can’t I rub her a little now, toward the heart—to start it up—I know just how; I have a Red Cross diploma for first aid—I’m a Camp Fire Girl!” The sobbing, gurgling exclamation burst from Jessica; on the heels of the sob came a little whistling, thrush-like note like the beginning of a song, a song of succor.
“Yes, I think you might—now—while I ‘piece in’ her breathing.”
“Here, Olive, you hold the watch; it isn’t so important to time the pressures any more; she’s coming round—coming round all right!”
With the timepiece upon her palm ticking little Rebecca’s life back, measuring the intervals between her reviving gasps, Olive stood and watched.
Golden lad! Dripping girl, a year his junior! Camp Fire Girl! Eagle Scout! Together they worked and rubbed. And life, kindly life, so reluctant to quit even a dumb tabernacle, answered their call, stealing upon slow wings of returning circulation through the silent child’s body.
Suddenly the timepiece trembled in the hand that held it. That of which Olive had spoken in the library as swelling up so big in her at times; the nameless tide of a young girl’s ideals, of her rapture at beauty, her adoration of the Father’s Presence she saw in it, her dim drawings toward service and hero-worship; that impulsive tide rose so high in her now that it had to find a temporary outlet in the tears of agitation and relief stealing down her cheeks.
Only a temporary one! Olive had groped girlishly to find a channel of self-expression for that tide; she had tried to let it ooze out of her in rhyming, to work it off in painting—or attempts thereat.