“No! no!” protested Geof. “Put your head out the window. You’ll see her! I tried to hold her down, but——”
“The flying-machine!” I cried, with one distraught, comprehensive look about the dismantled workshop.
At that moment a clamour rose to us from the street below.
“Have yez got er license?” bawled an infuriated Irish voice. “Come down out ov thot. I arr-rest yez!”
“It’s only a kid girl,” sang a shrill chorus of gamins. “I seen her petticoats!”
In another instant mother and I were on the roof, straining over the stone coping. Some fifteen feet below us, about on a level with the nursery window now, sailed Ernie. She sat quite rigid in the car, which laboured and beat a curiously straight course between the two rows of houses directly down the middle of the street. We could hear the tick-tock of the motor and the excited comments of the crowd.
“Ernie!” I cried. “Oh, Ernie!”
Ernie’s pallid countenance was raised to us.
“Good-bye, mother dear!” she wailed in plaintive crescendo. “Give my pinky ring to Mary Hobart, and——”
Mother turned. For a moment I thought she was going to jump off the roof. But instead she sped, Geof and I at her heels,—it wasn’t running, it wasn’t flying,—down the ladder through the workshop, down two flights of stairs to the second story, where, throwing up a window, she reached out in a vain attempt to grasp the short length of dangling anchor-line. But already it was too late. The car and the crowd had passed by.