"I'll be back in a moment," cried Gazen, springing upstairs to the observatory.
"Do you feel any better, father?" enquired Miss Carmichael, laying her cool hand on the invalid's fevered brow.
He winked, and tried to nod in the affirmative. "Were you asleep, father? Did the shock rouse you?"
He winked again.
"Do you know what we are doing?" Before he could answer the foot of Gazen sounded on the stair. He had left us with an eager, almost a confident eye. He came back looking grave in the extreme.
"We are not falling towards Mercury," he said gloomily. "We are rushing to the sun!"
I cannot depict our emotion at this awful announcement which changed our hopes into despair. Probably it affected each of us in a different manner. I cannot recollect my own feelings well enough to analyse them, and suppose I must have been astounded for a time. A vision of the car, plunging through an atmosphere of flame, into the fiery entrails of the sun, flashed across my excited brain, and then I seemed to lose the power of thought.
"Out of the frying-pan into the fire," said I at last, in frivolous reaction.
"His will be done!" murmured Miss Carmichael, instinctively drawing closer to her father, who seemed to realise our jeopardy.
"We must look the matter in the face," said Gazen, with a sigh.