Oh! Heaven be praised, she lived!—there was even a chance that I might restore her.
Again I set to work with an energy born not of despair now, but eager hope—again I made use of every device I had ever seen tried by which those almost drowned might be restored.
God was good—she moved, she sighed, she opened her blue eyes and looked with gentle love at me.
I was wild with delight.
One moment I capered upon the sand, like a Fiji Islander at a victory feast—then kneeling I took her in my arms and pressed her against my heart as though I would through personal contact enthuse her with a portion of the life and vigor that abounded so plentifully in my own system.
Hildegarde recovered rapidly.
Perhaps nature was assisted by the consciousness of our new-found happiness, for the way in which her little hand would now and then close eagerly on mine when I was chafing it, told that she had not forgotten what had happened just before we were hurled from the breaking wreck.
So she became herself again, the color slowly came back to her white cheeks, and life once more took up its sway; but it would always give me a shudder to think how perilously near the borderland of eternity my Hildegarde had been.
Now we could even begin to think of others.
Were we the only survivors of the wreck—Gustavus, Diana, Robbins, Carmencita, Cummings, had they all been drowned?