most frantic with fear and quite out of their bearings, were doing
their best to grapple with the problem of life or death so suddenly
placed before them.

Kneeling, she turned the girl's livid little face towards her, vainly
feeling for the pulse in the wrist and bruised neck; then sprang to her
feet, faced the Principal and took the situation into her strong, capable
young hands.

"What happened? And have you sent for the doctor?"

Her usually sweet, clear voice was like the dull sound of a cracked
earthenware pot when flipped by thumb and finger.

"Yes, dear!" was the quick reply. "The doctor will be here any
moment--and hot bottles and blankets are being prepared. Gertrude could
not sleep and crept into Jessica's room to look for a German grammar for
the examination to-morrow--to-day, and found Jessica in--in this--faint."

And the elder woman suddenly laid a hand on the girl's arm and looked up
at her with the confidence she always inspired. "Help me, dear!" she
whispered, with the dread of disgrace and an untimely ending to an
honourable career in her old grey eyes.

And Leonie smiled, answering with the superb confidence of youth, and a
slight ray of hope pierced the suffocating fog of fear, and brought
Cookie from the head of the bed where she had been standing in the shade
of a screen.

"Can I 'elp, Miss Lee-onny?"

"Cookie, _dear_--you and Miss Primstinn, Miss Leanto and--yes, and
Ellen--none of the girls--and quickly--there's not a moment to lose."

"The doctor's coming, Mum," said a voice from the half-open door.

"The doctor is coming, dear," repeated the Principal.

Leonie answered with a strange authority in her words.

"We will not wait for the doctor!" She passed the tips of her fingers
slowly across her forehead and down her cheek to the back of her neck, as
was her habit when trying to solve some problem. "No, we will not wait,
because--because _I_ know!"

Ten minutes later the door opened to let in a young man, who stood for a
moment outlined against a sea of faces, and then turned and shut the door
most decisively and locked it.

"Who thought of that, I wonder," he said to himself, as he watched the
four women kneeling round Jessica stretched out upon the floor.

They were going through the movements used in resuscitating the drowned,
and he, too, knelt at a nod by the side of the fat old woman in an
emerald green moirette petticoat and a somewhat _declasse_ bedjacket, who
wa