'It's mine. It weally is my shell--it weally is!'
He dodged Nevill Lloyd also, who dashed at him yelling--'Drop it, you young fool'; and he might have gone on dodging others till that tiny glow sizzled in to the powder, if some one else, realising the situation and the few seconds' grace that remained, had not shouted--
'Hold tight, Jerry! Hold tight!'--and so, with that reassuring request had run to the child, caught him in his arms, and forced a way through the crowd to the parapet.
'Now, my lad, heave!' came the order.
And Jerry, who had held tight, heaved, since these were reasonable orders. Heaved not an instant too soon, however, for the round black thing was still so close when it changed to a flash, a flame, a roar, that it left Jack Raymond and the child wholly dazed and half blind, all singed and powder-grimed.
They were still standing so, bewildered, the man's face and the child's close together disguised by their very griminess into quaint likeness, when Grace Arbuthnot came up to them.
'He isn't hurt,' said Jack Raymond, quickly setting down the child, partly to prove his words, partly because he wished to dissociate himself from the situation as far as possible. The action, however, brought him closer to her eyes, and something in them, something in the faint perfume of heliotrope about her dress, the perfume he remembered so well, made him feel ashamed of his own thought.
'He is really not hurt,' he continued in a low voice for her ear alone. 'And he behaved--as I should have expected your son to behave.'
He had not meant to say so much, but something of the old confidence seemed to have returned to him with the old memory; and to her also, for she shook her head and said, almost with a smile--
'He is not a bit like me--he is far more like you.' She paused, startled at her own unconsidered words, and looked at him with a sudden shrinking in her face.