“This is the effect of the rarified air upon the ear.”
“Uncle, the objects below us grow smaller and smaller, we must be rising higher and higher; I thought that you meant to descend.”
Augustine’s only reply was a look which in an instant, as by a lightning flash, revealed to the young girl the full danger of their situation.
“You cannot descend!” she gasped forth, clasping her hands in terror.
“Remember him,” said Augustine in a very low voice; “if he knew our helpless condition, I believe that it would turn his brain.”
“But cannot you tell how to let out the gas?”
“I cannot—”
“You who know everything—”
“I do not know this.”
Mabel sank back upon the seat from which she had half risen while addressing her uncle, who, holding firmly by a rope, was standing upright in the car. She was a brave girl, and acted as such; she neither uttered cry nor shed tear, but she turned very pale and cold, and shivered as if mantled in ice. It gave her now a sickening oppression to gaze below. Was she never, never to return to that earth which lay beneath her—never again to be pressed to her father’s heart—never to meet the smile of her sister! Was she to float on in these dreary regions never before visited by man, buoyed up in a moving coffin, till—