She
screamed wildly for help, and screamed again. And he had gone on, and
wavered and crashed over upon his face, when Caleb Hunter and her
father came running heavily across the lawn in answer to her shrieks.
Between them they lifted him and carried him into the house.
CHAPTER XXIV
--AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW
They carried him into the house and bore him upstairs, and laid him,
quiet now and almost pulseless, upon the bed. They stood there,
dumfounded, at the bedside, until Miss Sarah, re-entering the room,
coolly ordered them from underfoot and sent them back downstairs. And
at that their unprotesting obedience was of greater assistance than
their hands could have been; but when, after one glance at the girl's
stricken face, she tried the next instant to dismiss Barbara, for once
Miss Sarah's will alone proved insufficient. The girl refused,
point-blank, to go.
"He half undressed me and put me to bed," Barbara flung back in reply
to the spinster's final objection, "and if that did not shock you,
surely my staying now need not!"
The refusal itself brought a glint to the older woman's eyes and the
phrasing thereof a flush to her cheeks, but she wasted no more words in
what she knew to be useless argument. And though the girl grew sick
and sicker still while Miss Sarah cut away the sodden shirt and
started, with competent skill, to cleanse the wound, the latter let her
remain and hold a basin of antiseptic and replenish it when necessary.
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