“Where can we be going?” she exclaimed; “it is one flat blue expanse below, and there is a scent as if from the sea!”
“We must be over the Channel,” said Dashleigh; “Augustine Aumerle, what are you doing?”
His friend had lifted up his box of instruments and flung it over the side; the basket then followed. Augustine laid his hand on the grappling irons, but paused, till, at a shorter interval than before, the splash was heard from the sea.
“Are we sinking down?” exclaimed Mabel and Dashleigh as if with one breath.
Augustine nodded an assent, and threw over the grappling irons. Nothing remained in the car which could be flung away to lighten the balloon.
“Oh! what will become of us?—what will become of us?” exclaimed Mabel, clasping her hands in terror, as death in a new form stared her in the face.
“Nothing will keep the balloon up,” said Augustine Aumerle; “we must commend our souls to a merciful God.”
“Can you see no ship?” cried the earl; “no object moving on the waters?” and starting up in the eagerness of hope, he himself looked over the side of the car, but almost sickening at the dizzy prospect, sank back again to his place.
How gloriously burst the bright rays streaming from the eastern horizon! how splendidly rose the sun as a monarch rejoicing in his might, crimsoning the floating clouds, and casting across the waters a path of quivering gold! It struck the trembling Mabel with a sense of awful beauty, as nearer and nearer the Eaglet dropped toward ocean’s liquid grave! Again the coloured stripes of the ball shone bright in the light of day, but it was with something of horror that the travellers now regarded that which Mabel had once playfully spoken of as an emblem of swollen pride. It had carried them aloft through the clouds to dreary, deathlike isolation, but failed to support them now in the hour of peril and distress.