She said this as she hurried out of the room.
Poor girl! She had but too often had occasion to use the stimulant for the purpose she named.
Vivian almost unconsciously felt a reluctance to resign his beautiful burden, but he could not help seeing that the course proposed by Lotte was the proper one to be adopted; therefore he placed the yet lifeless Flora, with the tenderest carefulness, upon a chair, and supported her drooping head upon his breast.
Lotte, swift of foot, had not been a minute obtaining the ammoniacal salts and a teacup with water in it. She did not possess a tumbler, for she could not afford herself beer, and the water she took at her dinner, or supper—when she could afford to indulge in the latter luxury—was as sweet to her out of a cup as a glass.
She set to work, as a woman almost instinctively proceeds in these matters. While she had all that tender sympathy and commiseration which the condition of Flora could elicit from any one imbued with a generous susceptibility, she was endowed also with that species of calm self-possession and firm collectedness, so valuable in emergencies where human life is at stake.
She set Vivian to work bathing with the cool water the white temples from which his trembling fingers had parted the long waving hair, while she herself applied the ammonia to the nostrils of Flora, and chafed her palms when the inhalation had done its work.
Thus assaulted, nature returned to its duty, and reasserted its claims over the motionless system of the young girl, who gradually opened her eyes. Gazing wildly about her, she abruptly rose up from her seat, as though she had awakened out of some painful dream.
The faces of Vivian and Lotte seemed to confuse her; but when her large, sad eyes fell upon the unattractive countenance of Mr. Nutty, turned upon her with an aspect in which the expression was undecided—as he was not certain whether the swoon was a sham or a fact—memory returned, and her bereavement, with the future and all the horrors of its uncertainty—save that the direst poverty must attend it—burst upon her.
She wrung her hands in the fulness of her misery, and then she murmured through her blinding tears—
“Almighty Father! support me now!”