Esmé and Denzil ran down to the shore to play, and Dods and I strolled round a little. I remember all about that evening, even without looking up in my diary. I think I was telling him the story mamma had told me, of when she was a little girl, and the bathing machine, and papa saving her, and we had walked up a short way behind the house, to a part of the path, or road—it was a road, though a small one—from where you could see a bit of the drive from the lodge to the big house.
Suddenly something came in view—the queerest-looking thing you ever saw, like a van, and yet not like one, more like a small omnibus, only all over the top it was bumped out into all kinds of shapes, so that it looked like a gypsy's basket waggon, with a cover over.
'What can that be?' I said to Geordie.
And we both stared hard, as the thing slowly made its way along.
'The Trevors must have queer things sent to them,' I said. 'It isn't the railway van from the station, and yet, if it was travelling pedlars or anything of that kind, they wouldn't have let it in at the gates.'
Geordie did not speak. He has better eyes than I—I have always been a little near-sighted—and he stood there gazing before him with an odd expression creeping over his face. He saw—what I did not—a head, or part of one, poked out of the window at the back of the strange vehicle.
'Geordie,' I said at last, 'what are you staring at so? What do you think it is? Oh!' as I suddenly caught sight of a new feature in the mystery, 'I do believe the thing is coming down here, and not going to the big house at all.'
For there was a side road out of the drive just about the part that the strange carriage or waggon had now got to, which led in our direction.
'Yes,' said Geordie, turning to me, and speaking very slowly and distinctly, though there was a twinkle in his eyes, which rather spoilt the solemnity of his tone, 'you are right, Ida. I will tell you what it is—it is the balloon.'