Once again he paused beside the couch, and an electrode in each hand, the violet light dancing all about him, he raised his eyes in a short prayer. "God help me," he said, his voice half buried in the riot of sound. "Don't hold my pride against me. I ask it, not as the inventor, but as the father."
He did not speak again, nor did the friend who stood watchfully beside the spluttering, crashing machine. Three times he held the electrodes to her body, one over her heart, one against her back, but there was no movement, no sign of life. The leaping sparks seemed to pass through her tender frame, but she lay there still, with that awful stillness of the dead. The man, working over her, the father no longer, but the physician, the inventor, did not hesitate. Again and again she was enfolded in the bright beams of violet light. Again and again he held the leaping current to her heart, and at last, when, for what seemed to be the hundredth time he drew back and looked at her, his whole body suddenly stiffened, a hoarse cry burst from him, and he fell crashing to the floor.
Dr. Crossett shut off the current and sprang to him. He had fainted, and turning from him to Lola, Paul Crossett saw what the father had seen. A soft color slowly stealing back into that white face and a slow, steady rising and falling of her breast as her heart began again to beat.
On the following day the papers devoted a few lines to the accidental injury of a young girl, "Lola Barnhelm, daughter of Dr. Martin Barnhelm, a physician in good standing in the neighborhood." The fact that "the automobile by which the young lady was injured belonged to Richard Fenway, the well-known Wall Street broker, son of old Dick Fenway of Cleveland, and a well-known figure in the life of the 'Broadway crowd,'" seemed to be of more general interest than the account of her injury, but two of the papers noted the fact that "she was at first pronounced dead and later found to be merely suffering from shock."
What Dr. Barnhelm and Dr. Crossett said to one another no one besides themselves ever knew. To John, after the moment when Dr. Crossett went to him, white-faced, and awed, and told him that Lola was alive, they said nothing.