Tommy was relieved. The trip had been planned in his honor, and he had had to feign a deep interest in Northern sports; actually he had had a distinct premonition that he was due to make a general ass of himself on snowshoes.
It was decided that they should drive up to the cabin for dinner, instead. They found the cabin mired in slush, and with a leaking roof, but a crackling fire in the stone hearth, and the uncertain melodies from a small phonograph which some one unearthed, put them all in high spirits. When they had tired of dancing over the uneven floors they constituted themselves into an exploring party, and wandered down to the river and out on the soft ice.
Presently, Providence took a hand.
Millicent, who had run ahead of the rest, shrieked suddenly, balanced wildly for an instant, and fell into an air-hole in the ice.
It took but a very few moments to lift her out, and take her up to the cabin, but in that period she had been seriously chilled from exposure in the icy water. The men had done all that they could. Mary Skinner, small and frail, took command. Millicent was put to bed, before the hearth, bordering on the line of unconsciousness. A doctor was on the way. They could only wait.
Tommy was dazed. Millicent had suddenly became a great deal to him. The play of excited emotion, suddenly released, will do that. He sat on the steps, unmindful of his own damp clothes. Millicent’s light sweater was in his hands. Why, he wondered inconsistently, out of all this crowd of girls did it have to be Millicent who should be endangered?
“Tommy’s taking it pretty hard, I guess,” some one said. “He thinks an awful lot of Millicent.”
And for the first time, he did.
When the doctor had come, and given Millicent a hypodermic, they wrapped her carefully in rugs, and drove slowly back to town.