Half-stunned, confused, and wondering, Vane Lee awoke to the fact that he really was lying upon the carpet at the side of his bed, and for a few moments, he felt that he must have fallen out; but, in an indistinct fashion, he began to realise that he had heard a tremendous noise in his sleep, and started so violently that he had rather thrown himself than fallen out of bed, while to prove to him that there was something terribly wrong, there were loud shrieks from the lower part of the house, and from the passage came his uncle’s voice.
“Vane, my lad, quick! jump up!”
“It’s an earthquake,” panted Vane, as he hurried on his clothes, listening the while with fear and trembling, to the screams which still rose at intervals from below.
“That’s Eliza’s voice,” he thought, and directly after as he waited, full of excitement, for the next shock, and the crumbling down of the house, “That’s cook.”
Almost at the same moment a peculiar odour came creeping in beneath and round the door; and Vane, as he forced a reluctant button through the corresponding hole with fumbling fingers took a long sniff.
“’Tisn’t an earthquake,” he thought; “that’s gunpowder!”
The next moment, after trying to think of what gunpowder there was on the premises, and unable to recall any, he was for attributing the explosion, for such he felt it to be, to some of the chemicals in the laboratory.
That idea he quickly dismissed, for the screams were from the kitchen, and he was coming round to the earthquake theory again, when a thought flashed through his brain, and he cried aloud in triumph, just as the doctor threw open his door:—
“It is gunpowder.”
“Smells like it, boy,” cried the doctor, excitedly, “but I had none. Had you?”