“No,” replied the freshman, “this is the nearest I have ever been to it.”
“Well, thanks for taking care of my ring,” went on Judith. “I’ll see you after the game,” and she departed to take up her duties on the field, just as Rosamond, at the appointed time, with a gash across her face, made with finger-nail salve, was borne from the field on a stretcher.
After the game came another grand procession in which all the wounded took part, Molly on stilts, with Jessie running beside her, as before.
All that morning Molly had felt buoyed up by the fun and excitement of the great burlesque. But, now that the game was over, as she strode along on the giant stilts, she began to feel the same overpowering fatigue she had experienced that night at the living picture show. For a week she had been living on her nerves. Often at night she had not slept, but had tossed about on her bed trying to recall her lessons or make mental notes of things she intended to do. On cold mornings, her feet and hands were numb and dead and Judy often made her run across the campus and back to start her circulation. And now that numbness began to climb from her toes straight up her body. Molly turned unsteadily and with shaky strides at least six feet long, hastened across the field. Her feeling that she must get out of the noise and turmoil, away from everybody in the world, carried her back of a row of sheds under which the players sat during the intermissions. Once in this quiet place she let herself down from the stilts. She was conscious of being very cold. There was a deep red light in the western sky from the setting sun, then the numbness reached her brain and she remembered nothing more until she opened her eyes and saw Dr. McLean at one side of her and Professor Green at the other.
“Here she comes back at last,” exclaimed the doctor. “Aye, lass, it’s a good thing this young man has an observant eye. Otherwise ye might have been lying out here in the cold all night. You feel better now, don’t you?”
“Yes, doctor,” answered Molly weakly.
“I don’t like these fainting spells, my lass. You’re not made of iron, child. You’ll have to give up one thing or t’other—study or play.”
But there were other things Molly did beside studying and playing. Of course the doctor did not know about the “cloud-bursts” and the shoe-blacking and the tutoring.
“Aye, here comes one of my associates with a carriage,” he went on, chuckling to himself. “Shall we have a consultation now, Dr. Kean?”
Judy, still in her absurd burlesque costume, had driven up in one of the village surreys.