"I've broke mother's best china pitcher," said the lad, in a despairing voice.
"Poof!" replied Grace. "Pitchers can be mended or replaced. What else is wrong? You're not groaning over a broken pitcher, surely."
"You would, if it came over in the Mayflower, and was all of your ancestors' you had left to show that you could be a Colonial Dame. Ug-gh!" The boy tried to sit up, gasped, and fell back in a dead faint.
"Goodness!" said Grace; "he's broken his leg as well as his pitcher. Colonial Dames! What nonsense! Well, I can't leave him here."
She had her smelling-salts in her satchel, but before she could find them, Grace's satchel being an omnium gatherum of remarkable a miscellaneous character, the lad came to. A fainting person will usually regain consciousness soon if laid out flat, with the head a little lower than the body. I've seen people persist in keeping a fainting friend in a sitting position, which is very stupid and quite cruel.
"I am Doctor Wainwright's daughter," said Grace, "and I see my father's gig turning the corner of the road. You shall have help directly. Papa will know what to do, so lie still where you are."
GRACE'S FLAG OF DISTRESS.
The lad obeyed, there plainly being nothing else to be done. In a second Doctor Wainwright, at Grace's flag of distress, a white handkerchief waving from the top of her parasol, came toward her at the mare's fastest pace.
"Hello!" he said. "Here's Archie Vanderhoven in a pickle."