Dr. Crossett shut off the current and sprang to him. He had fainted, and turning from him to Lola, Paul Crossett saw what the father had seen. A soft color slowly stealing back into that white face and a slow, steady rising and falling of her breast as her heart began again to beat.
CHAPTER IV
BROUGHT TO LIFE
On the following day the papers devoted a few lines to the accidental injury of a young girl, “Lola Barnhelm, daughter of Dr. Martin Barnhelm, a physician in good standing in the neighborhood.” The fact that “the automobile by which the young lady was injured belonged to Richard Fenway, the well-known Wall Street broker, son of old Dick Fenway of Cleveland, and a well-known figure in the life of the ‘Broadway crowd,’” seemed to be of more general interest than the account of her injury, but two of the papers noted the fact that “she was at first pronounced dead and later found to be merely suffering from shock.”
What Dr. Barnhelm and Dr. Crossett said to one another no one besides themselves ever knew. To John, after the moment when Dr. Crossett went to him, white-faced, and awed, and told him that Lola was alive, they said nothing.
John was content. He loved her, and she had come back to him! Had she for those few moments been really dead, or had the young ambulance surgeon been mistaken? What did it matter? Late that night they had allowed him to creep softly to her chamber door, and looking in he had seen her sleeping quietly, and they assured him that, aside from a probable nervous shock, she was quite unharmed.
In the days that followed the nervous shock turned out to be more serious than was at first supposed. Physically, Lola seemed to be in good condition, but for the first time in her life she was unjust, irritable, and jealous. Dr. Crossett claimed this to be a fine symptom of returning health.
“Temper,” he remarked cheerfully, “is the copyright trade-mark of the convalescent,” but to John her sudden, unreasonable fits of anger and a feeling that in anyone but Lola he would have described as selfishness amazed and alarmed him.
Dr. Barnhelm, too, seemed changed, but in his case the change was for the better. He was closeted all day, and often almost all night with his machine, and its low throbbing penetrated the whole building and brought indignant protests from the other tenants, protests that were received by the Doctor with a slow smile of contempt and at once forgotten.
From the moment when he was assured of his daughter’s safety, he buried himself in his work, calm and happy, with little thought for anything but this great discovery of his—this wonderful invention that was to do so much for suffering humanity.