It did not take long to make the coffee, and its fumes put courage into the chilled and tired group waiting it even before the invigorating beverage had been tasted.
Dr. Fairbairn set down his empty cup with a satisfied smack of the lips. "Now, Bruce," he said, "we are both fortified to bind up your wounds, pouring in oil like true Samaritans."
The other boys helped remove Bruce's coat, a painful process, and the doctor's scissors bared his arms to the shoulders. They were badly burned, and Dr. Fairbairn's big, deft hands moved over them with extreme gentleness, anointing them and covering them with absorbent cotton which he bound into place with the linen bandages produced from the capacious depths of his inexhaustible pockets.
Bruce's hands had fared worse than his arms; they were ministered to in turn, and the poor lad found some respite from his pain when the ointment was bound on and the air excluded.
Wythie and Rob in the meantime had been helping Miss Charlotte to bed in their mother's room. She scarcely spoke; there was no need of Dr. Fairbairn's injunction to the girls to make her keep silence. She seemed utterly dazed, and there was a look in her face that made her cousins fear that the fright of the night had affected her mind. They gave her the sedative which Dr. Fairbairn had prepared, and Rob ran down-stairs, leaving Wythie on guard at Miss Charlotte's side.
"Do you think she can be injured—mentally I mean?" Rob asked, ending her account of Miss Charlotte's docile, silent and lost manner of behaving.
"Not a bit, I am certain," said Dr. Fairbairn cheerfully, though he could not help realizing that cases where a shock had permanently affected the mind were by no means rare.
"Charlotte is too well-balanced to be unhinged. We must expect her to suffer from a shock like this, and from the grief of losing a home to which she was deeply attached. You must keep her perfectly quiet, and we must make her sleep and sleep, until her quivering nerves are restored. She must not be allowed to talk of to-night more than just enough to prevent her dwelling on it in secret and magnifying its events. Bruce, do you feel able to tell us in a few words just what did happen to you—What made you go into that house when Charlotte and her maid were both out, and where did you find her at last?"
"It doesn't take long to tell how I happened to go in," said Bruce. "There seemed to be a growing conviction in the crowd that Miss Charlotte must be in the house, or some one would be able to account for her. So I went in to see."