Quite as if she had performed a miracle, the children gathered around the bed, wide eyed and wondering. Ellen stared so that her eyes fairly bulged out in glaring balls. She had been the most terrified, probably having a keener understanding of the fate that hung over them, and perhaps, feeling somewhat responsible for her mother’s accident.
“I put it on the chair,” she protested, “and ma was asleep. When she woke—” She clenched her hands and still stared at the figure on the bed as if trying to realize that it breathed and was not dead.
“Don’t be so excited,” cautioned Gloria, although her own heart beat so she could scarcely keep her arm under the shoulders, while the sick woman sipped and gasped. Finally, after taking perhaps two tablespoonsful of the reviving liquid, the heavy burden shifted itself from Gloria’s support, back to the pillow with a collapsing sigh.
“Better?” asked Gloria, with a sense of liberation.
“Yes,” came the word faintly spoken. Then the fluttering eyes closed and the woman’s breathing seemed less gasping.
“Now?” asked Gloria glancing around for the first time at the children who seemed huddled all over the place. “What shall we do?”
“Mrs. Berg ain’t home,” spoke up Marty, who appeared to have the most sense of any of the panic stricken brood. He seemed like Tommy in his self reliance.
“She’s the woman who comes in,” explained Ellen.
“She lives by the canal,” added another child, whom Ellen called May.
“I’ll jump on my wheel and get a doctor,” Gloria volunteered.