Down went the horrid spoonful, and Marion was eagerly at work chafing her limbs and rubbing her hands, hurrying Eurie meantime who had started for the hotel in search of help and hot water.
That dreadful fifteen minutes! Not one of them but that thought it was hours. They never forgot the time when they fought so courageously, and yet so hopelessly, with death. Ruth did not seem to grow worse, but she looked ghastly enough for death to have claimed her for his victim; and Flossy did not return. Eurie came back to report a fire made and water heating, and seizing a pail was about to start again, when her eye caught the open satchel, and a bottle quietly reposing there, closely corked and tied over the top with a bit of kid; she gave a scream as loud as the first had been.
"What is the matter now?" Marion said. "Eurie, do have a little common sense."
"She didn't take it!" burst forth Eurie. "It is all a mistake. It was the right bottle. Here is the other, corked, just as I put it."
Before this sentence was half concluded Ruth was sitting up in bed, and Marion, utterly overcome by this sudden revulsion of feeling, was crying hysterically. There is no use in trying to picture the rest of that excitement. Suffice it to say that the events of the next hour are not likely to be forgotten by those who were connected with them. Eurie came back to her senses first, and met and explained to the people who had heard the alarm, and were eagerly gathering with offers of help. There was much talk, and many exclamations of thankfulness and much laughter, and at last everything was growing quiet again.
"I can not find the doctor," Flossy had reported in despair. "He has gone to Mayville, but Mr. Roberts will be here in a minute with a remedy, and he is going right over to Mayville for the doctor."
"Don't let him, I beg," said Marion, who was herself again. "There is nothing more formidable than a spoonful of your hair-oil. I don't know but the poor child needs an emetic to get rid of that. Eurie, my dear, can't you impress it on those dear people that we don't want any hot water? I hear the fourth pail coming."
It was midnight before this excited group settled down into anything like quiet. But the strain had been so great, and the relief so complete, that a sleep so heavy that it was almost a stupor at last held the tired workers.
Now, what of it all? Why did this foolish mistake of bottles, which might have been a tragedy, and was nothing but a causeless excitement, reach so far with its results?
Let me tell you of one to whom sleep did not come. That was the one who but half an hour before had believed herself face to face with death! What mattered it to her that it was a mistake, and death no nearer to her, so far as she knew, than to the rest of the sleeping world?