She seemed to have fallen miles and miles, when finally she sensed a gradual slackening of her speed. Grace had, on account of her light weight, taken a terrific plunge, but the parachute at last began to open. It did not bring her up with a jerk, but gradually, until her downward motion was reduced to about four hundred feet a minute, fast enough for a human being to fall.
Opening her eyes, Grace looked up and she breathed a sigh of relief as she saw the glistening silk of the huge parachute spread out high above her, slender lines running down from it, all centering in two ropes that looked reasonably safe. Up above, the lines looked cobwebby, too delicate for the purpose they were serving. Grace looked down, but raised her eyes quickly. The awful distance between her and the earth was too much for her ordinarily steady nerves to stand when she visualized it.
As she raised her eyes something suddenly floated into the range of her vision. It was a parachute and was coming down rather close to her.
“The major!” gasped the Overton girl. Then Grace Harlowe laughed. It was a hollow sort of a laugh, and sounded weak in her ears. The major’s arms and legs were sprawling as he leaned a little forward, and he looked for all the world like a great spider dangling from the end of a string, which so appealed to Grace Harlowe’s sense of humor that she forgot herself and laughed. Being much heavier than she he was rapidly gaining on her and would soon pass her at his present falling speed.
Grace, observing the ludicrousness of his position, quickly wrapped her ankles about each other, not desiring to make such a spectacle of herself as the balloon officer was doing.
Now they were abreast of each other and could look into each others’ faces. The Overton girl had been preparing herself for this very moment and at the instant the major came near enough to catch the full import of it, Grace smiled, and waved at him what ordinarily might have passed for a joyous hand.
The major waved back and shouted something at her, but she was unable to understand it. Voices up there sounded hollow, weak and far away. A few moments later she was looking down on the top of his swaying parachute, then Grace untangled herself and permitted her body to hang limply, which she found much easier than keeping herself under a strong physical strain.
“Hippy Wingate wouldn’t let me land his airplane. I wonder what he would say were he to see me making a landing in Germany from a parachute?” murmured the girl.
By this time objects began to grow out of the landscape in more or less detail. Houses appeared; the Rhine shimmered in the sunlight that had broken through the clouds, and here and there she thought she saw human beings, though she could not be positive as to this. Several villages came within her range of vision. Remarkable as it seemed to her, Grace realized that she had lost all fear. She was beginning to feel a great confidence in that filmy silk umbrella-shaped affair that was swaying far above her, that confidence having been born when she saw how easily it supported the major’s bulky figure.
“If the thing only will let me out without cutting up, I shall be well pleased,” Grace told herself. “I wonder what has become of the major?” He had passed out of her sight. Had the Overton girl looked for him further to the westward, she might have discovered the silk parachute settling down on the Rhine and, soon afterwards, the doughty major floundering in its waters.