Nevertheless Bobbin pounded again and again, almost automatically her thin arms seemed to work, and yet all her effort was without avail.
During these moments no one can guess exactly what emotions tore at the girl's heart. If only she could have cried out her alarm and her desire, surely she would have been answered!
Bobbin's face worked strangely, there was a kind of throbbing in her ears and her lips moved. "Polly!" she called in a hoarse little whisper, and this was the first word she had ever spoken in her life.
Inside in her smoke-filled room Polly O'Neill could not possibly have heard her. For the past fifteen minutes, during all the excitement due to the fire, she had been lying upon her bed in a stifled condition. For no one had realized that as Polly's room was immediately above the back parlor, where the fire had been smouldering ever since the children had gone up-stairs to bed, her room had been first to be filled with smoke. Yet the smoke had come so slowly, so gradually as she lay in a kind of exhausted sleep, that she had been stupefied rather than awakened by it.
Now was it the miracle rather than the sound of Bobbin's speaking her name that penetrated slowly to Polly's consciousness, or was it the noise of the repeated pounding of the heavy chair against her door? Whatever the cause, she came back to the world, choking, blinded, fighting with her hands to keep off the black substance that was crowding into her lungs.
Then somehow she managed to crawl across her room, remembering that the smoke would be denser higher up in the atmosphere. Unlocking the door, she turned the handle and Bobbin caught her as she half fell into the hall.
With a quick movement the girl put her arm about the older woman's waist and started for the stairway, for the hall was dense with smoke and now and then a tongue of flame leaped up from below and seemed to dance for a moment in the air about them.
It was overpowering, unendurable. Polly was already dazed and exhausted and her lungs were always delicate. At the top of the stairs she became a dead weight on her companion's arms. Besides, by this time Bobbin too was very weary.