Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 5).djvu/112

 Hagar offered condolence and supper, but I would partake of neither; and I went up to bed at once, prepared to cry myself to sleep, as other girls would have done in such a plight as mine.

As I entered my room with a lighted candle in my hand, there came an awful crash at the window—the glass and framework were shivered to atoms, and in the current of air that rushed through the room, my light went out. Then there came a crackling, breaking sound from the branches of the old apple tree beneath my window; then a scraping on the bricks and window-ledge; then more splintering of glass and window-frame: the blind broke away at the top, and my toilet table was overturned—the looking-glass smashing to pieces on the floor, and I was conscious that someone had stepped into the room.

At the same moment the door behind me was pushed open, and Hagar, frightened out of her wits, peered in with a lamp in her hand.

By its light I first saw Phillip Rutley.

A well-built, manly, handsome young fellow, with bright eyes and light, close-cropped curly hair, he seemed like a merry boy who had just popped over a wall in search of a cricket ball rather than an intruder who had broke into the house of two lone women in so alarming a manner.

My fear yielded to indignation when I realized that it was a strange man who had made his way into my room with so little ceremony, but his first words—or rather the way in which he spoke them—disarmed me.

"I beg ten thousand pardons. Pay for all the damage. It's only my balloon!"

"Good gracious!" ejaculated Hagar.

My curiosity was aroused. I went forward to the shattered window.

"Your balloon! Did you come down in a balloon? Where is it?"

"All safe outside," replied the aeronaut consolingly. "Not a bad descent, considering this confounded—I beg pardon—this confound-ing fog. Thought I was half a mile up in the air. Opened the valve a little to drop through the cloud and discover my location. Ran against your house and anchored in your apple tree. Have you any men about the place to help me get the gas out?"

We fetched one of our farm labourers, and managed things so well, in spite of the darkness, that about midnight we had the great clumsy thing lying upon the lawn in a state of collapse. Instead of leaving it there with the car safely wedged into the apple-tree, until the morning light would let him work more easily, Rutley must needs "finish the job right off," as he said, and the result of this was that while he was standing in the car a bough suddenly broke and he was thrown to the ground, sustaining such injuries that we found him senseless when we ran to help him.

We carried him into the drawing-room, by the window of which he had fallen, and when we got the doctor to him, it was considered best that he should remain with us that night. How could we refuse him a shelter? The nearest inn was a long way off; and how could he be moved there among people who would not care for him, when the doctor said it was probable that the poor fellow was seriously hurt internally?