Like an arrow she sped to the bed, unconsciously pushing aside the women who, almost 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 was breathing heavily through the unaccustomed exercise.

“Let us be—­a bit, Sir!” she panted.  “She don’t some’ow feel—­quite—­as dead—­like!  Give us a—­a chance.  One—­two—­three—­four.  It’s the—­reg’lar—­as does—­it.  Miss Lee—­onny’s orders—­Sir—­bless er——­”