I had the most transient feeling of
nausea, and that was all. And the little dog which had seemed to hang
for a moment when the force of Gibberne's arm was expended fell with a
swift acceleration clean through a lady's parasol!

That was the saving of us. Unless it was for one corpulent old gentleman
in a bath-chair, who certainly did start at the sight of us and
afterwards regarded us at intervals with a darkly suspicious eye, and,
finally, I believe, said something to his nurse about us, I doubt if a
solitary person remarked our sudden appearance among them. Plop! We must
have appeared abruptly. We ceased to smoulder almost at once, though
the turf beneath me was uncomfortably hot. The attention of every
one--including even the Amusements' Association band, which on this
occasion, for the only time in its history, got out of tune--was
arrested by the amazing fact, and the still more amazing yapping and
uproar caused by the fact that a respectable, over-fed lap-dog sleeping
quietly to the east of the bandstand should suddenly fall through the
parasol of a lady on the west--in a slightly singed condition due to the
extreme velocity of its movements through the air. In these absurd
days, too, when we are all trying to be as psychic, and silly, and
superstitious as possible! People got up and trod on other people,
chairs were overturned, the Leas policeman ran. How the matter settled
itself I do not know--we were much too anxious to disentangle ourselves
from the affair and get out of range of the eye of the old gentleman in
the bath-chair to make minute inquiries. As soon as we were sufficiently
cool and sufficiently recovered from our giddiness and nausea and
confusion of mind to do so we stood up and, skirting the crowd, directed
our steps back along the road below the Metropole towards Gibberne's
house. But amidst the din I heard very distinctly the gentleman who
had been sitting beside the lady of the ruptured sunshade using quite
unjustifiable threats and language to one of those chair-attendants who
have "Inspector" written on their caps. "If you didn't throw the dog,"
he said, "who DID?"

The sudden return of movement and familiar noises, and our natural
anxiety about ourselves (our clothe's were still dreadfully hot, and
the fronts of the thighs of Gibberne's white trousers were scorched a
drabbish brown), prevented the minute observations I should have liked
to make on all these things. Indeed, I really made n