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a rock under her feet and pushed off strongly. She swam fifty feet under water, with the breath trickling deliciously from her nostrils and tickling the dusty sides of her neck. She broke surface and trod water, getting her bearings. The drowning girl was not in sight. She glanced at the bank. The four girls were all out of the water now, clutching at each other in a noisy, hysterical ecstasy. She heard one of them say, “All this yelling … have the whole countryside here in a minute … where’s my sunsuit?” Then, from the corner of her eye, she saw a disturbance in the water. She swung to it and sounded. She found bottom at about fourteen feet, according to the pain in her ears. She beat her way along it, until something thumped her on the shoulder. She rolled over and looked up, and in the dimness saw the doubled-up body of the girl Beatrice, with weakly flailing hands and round, terrified eyes.
    Quietly got her feet under her and sprang upward, winding her hand in the girl’s long hair as she shot past. They came to the surface together, the last of Quietly’s wind whooshing out of her. She slipped her arm around the girl’s neck, and with a thrust of her knee turned the half-unconscious creature over on her back. With Bee’s chin in the crook of her arm, her shoulder holding Bee’s head up, Quietly swam for shore with a powerful side-stroke.
    “Look!” squeaked one of the girls.
    “It’s a
man!
” gasped Clara, and dived for her clothes.
    “It is
not
,” said another, already in a brief sunsuit.
    The four stood open-mouthed as Quietly found footing andstepped up the bank, carrying Beatrice in her arms. Two of them splashed into the water to clutch and grab and weep. “Speak to me, Bee darling!” Quietly shouldered her way through them with such directness that the girl in the sunsuit sat forcibly in the water.
    “Who’s
she?
”
    “She
pushed
me!”
    Quietly swung her burden to the ground, turned the limp body over with her foot so that it was face-down, and knelt with one of her knees between the girl’s lower thighs. She turned Bee’s head to the right, separated the clenched teeth, pulled the tongue out, and then began a steady pressure and release on her floating ribs.
    “Get a towel!”
    “Chafe her wrists!”
    “Where did
she
come from?”
    “Is she dead?” asked Clara of Quietly. Quietly said nothing. She was counting to herself, to get the rhythm right.
    “Miss O’Laughlin’ll
murder
us!”
    “Will you
look
at the callouses on her
feet!
”
    “Bee’s dead! Oh, oh, oh-h-h!”
    “No she’s not. She’s upchucking.”
    Quietly slacked off until the weak spasm had paused, and then went on. A minute later Bee moaned and coughed. Quietly sat back on her haunches and waited. The breathing was irregular, but stronger. She rose and turned the girl over on her back. The four immediately clustered around, weeping, lifting Bee’s head, rubbing her wrists, begging her to say something. Quietly could have walked off at that moment and it would never have been noticed. Instead she stood by, her face impassive, concealing a mingled amazement and amusement at this stupendous misdirection of nervous energy.
    Bee was helped to a sitting position now, supported by the affectionate arms of her friends. She began to cry softly. Clara, for the moment deprived of anything to embrace by the importunities of the other three, rose and came to Quietly.
    “Say,” she said, “That was wonderful of you. I just don’t know what we would’ve done without you, really I don’t.”
    Quietly smiled. Clara asked, “Where did you come from? You seemed to come right up out of the bottom of the lake!”
    Quietly hesitated. There was something she had been taught once about this kind of situation … She remembered it now. Her father had been reading aloud; it was one of the eighteenth-century picaresque novels. At its involved climax, he put the book down and said,
    “You see the amount of trouble a