“I believe in the value of an ad.,” said Mrs. Gudrun one night at the Paris Grand Opera, the Sceptre Theatre, London, being temporarily closed pending a new production. “Sarah believes in it, too—and that’s another of the remarkable points of resemblance between us. And for the sake of a puff, I’m willing to do all that a woman can.”

“Can’t do more,” said De Petoburgh, shaking his head owlishly. “Can’t possibly do more.”

“Shut up, De Peto. That woman’s ready to bite you for talking through her big aria,” commanded Mrs. Gudrun, with a slight glance of imperial indifference towards the infuriated prima donna. She dropped her opera-glasses into the orchestra with a crash, narrowly shaving the kettle-drums, and causing the cymbal-player to miss his cue, as she continued: “But, though I’m generally keen to see the pay-end of a big notion, this idea of Bobby Bolsover’s won’t do for macaroons. Not that I’m lacking in what the Americans call horse-grit—wasn’t I on De Brin’s automobile when he won the Paris-Rouen race with his Gohard Cup Defender in nineteen-three? That was one hairbreadth escape, from the revolver shot that started us—you remember Bobby put in ball cartridge by mistake—to the three flying kilometers at the finish, which we did on one wheel, as the brakes refused to act. And I’ve hung by one coupling over a raging American river in my own drawing-room Pullman saloon. But when it comes to dangling in a little basket that weighs next to nothing from a bag of gas that weighs nothing at all—I’m not taking any, and I don’t care who knows it. A captive balloon’s another thing. You’re cabled and sand-bagged and what not, and, unless you jump out, nothing can happen to you. But——Do see who’s knocking at the door!”

It was a uniformed and epauletted functionary conveying the polite intimation of the management that Madame and her party must positively maintain silence during the performance, or make themselves the trouble to depart!

“Tell him we’d had enough and were just going!” commanded Mrs. Gudrun. She rose, and, followed by the Duke, Bobby Bolsover, and Teddy Candelish—most active and ubiquitous of business managers, sailed out of the box, knocking over a fauteuil and carrying a footstool away upon the surging billows of her train. “Calls herself an artist!” she said, in reference to the prima donna, upon whose trills and roulades an enraptured audience hung breathless and enthralled; “and lets herself be put about by a little thing like that! Where’s her artistic absorption, I should like to know. Why, I’ve studied Juliet in the drawing-room where Bobby and De Petoburgh were having a rat-hunt under the tables and things, and what difference did it make to my conception of the part? Not a sou. And she was a shrimp-seller at Nice! They all have that voce squillante and those thick flat ankles and those rolling black eyes like treacle-balls. Let’s go and have some supper at the CafÉ Paris.”

Over American grilled lobster and quails Georges Sand, Bobby Bolsover’s grand notion for an advertisement, cropped up again. One may explain that it consisted in the suggestion that Mrs. Gudrun and party should electrify Paris, and subsequently London, by traveling per motor-airship from St. Cloud, rounding the Eiffel Tower in emulation of the immortal Santos, and returning to the Highfliers’ Club airship station at the Parc upon the conclusion of the feat. A friend of De Petoburgh’s, a distinguished member of the Highfliers’ Club, would undertake to lend the airship—a newly completed vessel, with basket accommodation for three. This philanthropist did not propose to share the notoriety by joining the trip, and it was to be distinctly understood that De Petoburgh was to be responsible for any expenses involved.

And Bobby Bolsover, brimming, as usual, with genuine British bravery and brandy-and-soda, was ready to assume command.

“You know the principle of a motor?” Bobby demanded, as the supper proceeded, and a collection of champagne corks, gradually amassed on the corner of the table, assumed proportions favorable to purposes of demonstration.

“Candelish knows the principle of a motor,” said De Petoburgh. “Never could learn myshelf. Too much borror!”

“One may say that there is gasoline in a receptacle,” began Teddy. “Air passing through becomes charged with gas, and comes out ready to explode. Then——”

“To explode,” agreed De Petoburgh; “absorutely correc’ dennifishion, by Ringo!”

“Don’t mind De Peto: he’s in for one of his old attacks,” said Mrs. Gudrun. “His legs have been all over the place since breakfast. Well?”

“You give a twirl to a crank,” said Bobby Bolsover.

“Down goes the piston,” continued Teddy.

“Down go her pistol,” nodded De Petoburgh.

“And the dashed thing begins working automatically,” exclaimed Bobby Bolsover. De Petoburgh balked at the six-syllabled hedge. “Now, an airship is an example of——”

“The effectiveness of an aËrial propeller driven by a petrol motor,” put in Teddy.

“Jusso,” said De Petoburgh. “Jusso.”

“There is, practically speaking, no danger whatever,” pursued Bobby Bolsover, warming to the subject, “that does not attend other popular pursuits. You may be thrown from a horse, or tumble off a coach-box——”

“Did once,” said De Petoburgh, smiling in sad retrospection.

“Or you may blow up in a motor,” went on Bobby.

“But in either case,” said Mrs. Gudrun, with point, “one is on the ground, not hanging between heaven and earth, like What’s-his-name’s coffin.”

“Brarro!” exclaimed De Petoburgh. “Encore! Bis!”

“Permit me to put in, dear lady,” said Teddy Candelish, with his best professional manner, “that if you fall out of an airship, you eventually finish on the ground!”

“Under,” gloomily interpolated De Petoburgh. “Under.”

“And, further,” said Bobby Bolsover, “the guide-rope is in connection with the ground all the time. Seventy feet of it, trailing like——”

“Snakes!” said the irrepressible De Petoburgh, with a glassy stare.

“And,” went on Bobby, “we will have four picked men from the Highfliers’ Club Grounds to run beside the guide-rope all the way and back.”

“Thus combining personal advertisement,” said Teddy Candelish, “with physical integrity.”

Mrs. Gudrun permitted her classical features to soften. “Now you’re talking!” the lady said. She smiled through the bottom of her champagne-glass as Teddy, bowed in acknowledgment of the compliment, and the trip was arranged forthwith. Thanks to the discretion of Teddy Candelish, the preparations were kept so profoundly secret that all Paris was on the alert when the eventful morning dawned. The Highfliers’ Club Grounds were literally besieged, and the intending sky-navigators fought their way to the aËrodrome containing their vessel through a surging throng of scientists, editors, journalists, dandies, actresses, photographers, pickpockets, and politicians.

“Regular scrimmage—what?” panted Bobby Bolsover, as, bare-headed and disheveled, he reached the private side-door of the balloon-house.

“We ought to have slept here,” said Mrs. Gudrun, straightening her hat-brim as the breathless men collected her hairpins.

“Nothing but perches to sleep on,” objected Bobby Bolsover, indicating the skeleton arrangements of the vast interior.

Mrs. Gudrun, whose eye soared with Bobby’s, would have changed color had the feat been possible.

“Do we really climb up that awful ladder to get on board?” she inquired. “I have more nerve than any woman I know; but I wasn’t educated as an acrobat. J’en suis tout baba, Bobby, that you should have let us all in for a thing like this. We’re planted, however, and must go through. What crowds of smart women! What on earth has brought them out so early in the morning? It must have got about that I’m going to be killed!” She gulped and clutched Teddy. “I c-can’t go on in this scene! Make an apology—make an apology and say I’m ill. I am ill—horribly!”

“I feel far from frisky,” said Bobby Bolsover candidly. “Gout all last night in the head and eyes, and—every limb, in fact, that one relies upon in steering a motor. But, of course, I am ready to undertake the helm—unless anybody else would like to volunteer?”

He looked at Teddy, whose eye was clear, whose cheek was blooming, whose golden curls encroached upon a forehead unlined with the furrows of personal apprehension.

“W-what do you say, Teddy?” gasped Mrs. Gudrun.

“I deeply regret.... It is imperatively necessary, dear lady,” said Teddy glibly, “that in your absolute interests I should be at the ‘Fritz’ at twelve. The Paris representatives of the Daily Yelper, the Morning Whooper, and the Greenroom Rag, have appointed that hour to receive particulars of your start; three Berlin correspondents, one from Nice, and the editors of the Journal Rigolo and the Vie Patachon are to hole in ten minutes later; and there will be thousands of telegrams to open and answer. You know that the Syndicate of the Escurial Palace of Varieties have actually tendered to secure the turn. Therefore, though my heart will make the voyage in your company, I—cannot.”

Blue-eyed Teddy melted into thin air. Mrs. Gudrun, looking older than a professional beauty has any right to look, surveyed her companions with a hollow gaze of despair, while outside the aËrodrome Paris roared and waited. Bobby, as green as jade, in a complete suit of motor armor, goggles included, leaned limply against the ladder that led upwards to the platform of the aËrodrome. De Petoburgh, in foul-weather yachting kit, his glass fixed in his bloodshot left eye by the little mechanical contrivance that keeps it from tumbling, looked back. That debilitated nobleman, though shaky, was game to the backbone.

“I can’t drive a motor, Bolsover,” he said quite distinctly, “but I can drive you. Will you—oblige me—by climbing up that ladder? We follow. After you, dear lady!”

And the three negotiated the giddy ascent. Upon the platform they found the owner of the airship and the four workmen who, under promise of reward and threat of punishment, were to attend the guide-rope. The airship itself, a vast sausage-shaped silk bag of hydrogen, from which depended by rubber-sheathed piano wires a framework of proven bamboo supporting three baskets—one forward, one amidships, and one aft—hovered over the heads of the three depressed adventurers like a shapeless embodiment of adverse Fate. And Paris was growing impatient.

“Tell ’em to stick to the guide-rope, De Croqueville, for their lives,” urged Bobby feverishly, squeezing the hands of the owner of the machine. “Give it ’em in their own lingo; my French isn’t fluent to-day. They’re not to trust to my steering, but just tow us to the Tower and back.”

De Croqueville squeezed back, and embraced Bobby on both cheeks. “My brave, my very dear, rely upon me. Madame”—he kissed the jeweled knuckles of Mrs. Gudrun—“all Paris is assembled to behold the most beautiful woman prove herself also to be of the most brave. M. le Duc,” he saluted De Petoburgh distantly, and then cordially shook hands, “I am as kin a sportsman as how you. I have plank my egg—my oof—a thousand francs you circulate the Tour Eiffel, in spite of the wind, which blows from the wrong quarter. Adieu!”

“Blows from the wrong quarter!” gasped Bobby Bolsover. The eyeglass of De Petoburgh turned in his direction, and he immediately climbed the forward ladder and got into the steersman’s creaking basket, and grasped the wheel with an awful sinking immediately below the heart.... The Duke helped Mrs. Gudrun to assume the central position, and got in astern. Just before the starting word was given and the great doors of the aËrodrome rolled apart in their steel grooves, he leaned over to De Croqueville, addressing that gentleman in his own language:

“One supposes she”—he alluded to the vessel—“is—sea—I mean air-worthy—eh, my friend?”

De Croqueville shot up his eyebrows and spread his hands.

“One supposes.... Truly, dear friend, I know not!... The vessel is newly complete—this is what in English you call the try-trip. That is why I hedge my bet. One thousand francs you round the Tour Eiffel and return uninjure—two thousand you do not return uninjure—whether you round the Tour or no. Adieu-dieu!”

The electric signal rang. The colossal doors groaned apart. The four workmen scuttled down the ladders like frightened mice, seized the guide-rope, and towed the airship out of dock. Paris waved handkerchiefs, cheered. Bobby Bolsover, ghastly behind his goggles, pressed the pedal and manipulated the wheel. The engine throbbed, the tail-shaft screw revolved. The adventurers had started.

“Qui-quite nice,” gulped Mrs. Gudrun tremulously, as the keen wind toyed with her silk veil and fluttered her fur boa.

“She pitches,” said De Petoburgh briefly. “Keep her head to it, Bolsover.”

There was a sickening moment as the airship mounted obliquely upward.... Then a tug at the guide-rope brought her nose down, pointing to the sea of fluttering handkerchiefs beneath. Mrs. Gudrun groaned and clung to the sides of her padded basket. De Petoburgh swore.

“I can’t—manage her. My—my nerve has gone. Let’s put about and take her back to dock again,” gasped Bobby.

“For—for Heaven’s sake, do!” groaned Mrs. Gudrun. But again that new voice spake from the blue lips of De Petoburgh, and——

“I’ve lived like a dashed blackguard, but I’m not going to die like a cowardly cad. Curtain’s up—go through with the show. Bolsover, you bragging, white-livered idiot, you can steer an electric launch and drive a motor-car. If I’d ever learned to do either, I’d take your place. But as I can’t—go ahead, and keep on as I direct, or I’ll shoot you through your empty skull with this revolver”—the click of the weapon came stimulatingly to the ears of the scared helmsman—“and swear I went mad and wasn’t responsible. They—they’d believe me! Mabel, if you sit tight and go through with this, I’ll stand you that thousand-guinea tiara you liked at Alphonse’s, if we—when we get safe to ground. Now, Bolsover, drive on, or take the consequences!”

Perhaps the familiar terms employed restored Bobby to the use of his suspended faculties. Certain it is that the airship began to forge steadily ahead at the rate of some twenty miles an hour—but not absolutely in the direction of the vast spidery erection of metal which was its destined goal. It skimmed in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne, keeping at so lofty an altitude that of the end of the guide-rope merely a length of some six feet trailed upon the ground.

“Those—those men l-look so funny running after it,” said Mrs. Gudrun, upon whom the promise of the tiara had acted as a stimulant.

“I hope they may keep up with it,” muttered De Petoburgh as the airship sailed over the humming streets of the gay city, and tiny men and women turned white specks of faces upwards to stare. “Ease her, Bolsover,” he commanded.

“Oh, we’re going right up again!” gasped Mrs. Gudrun. Then, as the airship regained the horizontal: “This isn’t half bad,” she said in a more cheerful tone, “but the housetops with their spiky chimney-pots look dreadfully dangerous. The guide-rope has knocked a row of potted geraniums off a third-floor balcony, and the old man who was reading the paper in the cane chair must be swearing awfully. But where are the men? I don’t see them; do you?”

The four workmen were at that moment heatedly cursing the Municipal Council of Paris at the bottom of a very long, very deep trench which had been excavated across a certain street for the accommodation of a new drain. The guide-rope pursued its course without them, now sweeping a peaceful citizen off his legs, now covering the occupants of a smart victoria with mud, now trailing over a roof or coiling serpent-wise around the base of a block of chimneys. In the distance loomed the Eiffel Tower, but in answer to De Petoburgh’s repeated requests that he should steer thither, Bobby Bolsover only groaned. And the airship, after navigating gracefully over the green ocean of the Bois de Boulogne, continued her trip over the Longchamps racecourse, veered to the south at the pleasure of a shifting current of air, and, having leaked much, began plainly to buckle and bend.

De Petoburgh, uncomfortably conscious of a misspent existence and wasted opportunities, looked at the back of Mrs. Gudrun’s head, and wondered whether she knew any prayers.

“The trees are coming awfully close, aren’t they?” said the unconscious beauty.

“Awfully!” said the Duke, as the capricious motor stopped.

Then Mrs. Gudrun screamed, and Bobby Bolsover, casting his goggles to the winds, huddled in the bottom of his basket, and the debilitated but plucky nobleman shut his eyes and thought of his long-dead mother as the airship hurtled downwards ... crash into the top of the tallest of the giant oaks in the magnificent park of H.S.H. Prince Gogonof Babouine.

The Prince has the reputation of being excessively hospitable. When the three passengers recovered from the shaking, the top of a long ladder pierced the thick foliage beneath the wrecked vessel, and the Prince’s major-domo, a stout personage in black with a gold chain, came climbing up with a courteous message from the Prince. Would Madame and M. le Duc and the other gentleman descend and partake of the second dÉjeuner, which was on the point of being served, or would they prefer to remain on board their vessel?

“Stop up here? Does the man take us for angels?” snorted Mrs. Gudrun indignantly.

The descent was not without danger, but with the aid of De Petoburgh and the major-domo, she braved and completed it without injury either to her long celebrated limbs or her famous features. Bobby followed.

The Prince entertained the shipwrecked castaways in princely fashion, and drove the party back to Paris on his drag, the wonderful yellow coach with the team of curly Orloffs. And he consented to dine; and that night Mrs. Gudrun held a reception behind the illuminated balconies of the Hotel Fritz, while the London newsboys were yelling her familiar name, and the evening papers containing the most ornamental particulars of her adventure went off like hot cakes.

According to the most reliable account garnered by our special correspondent from the lovely lips of the exquisite aËronaut, she had never quailed in the moment of peril, and, indeed, upon the distinguished authority of the Hon. R. Bolsover: “One is never frightened while one can rely upon one’s own pluck!” Nobody interviewed De Petoburgh, leaning vacuously smiling against the wall. Indeed, he had developed another of his attacks, and could not have responded with any coherence.

“Wonderful fellow, Bolsover,” Teddy Candelish gushed, Teddy, all smile and sparkle, “so brainy and resourceful!”

“Rath’ ...” assented De Petoburgh fragmentarily.

“And Her Nibs—a heroine—positively a heroine!”

“Ra’!” assented De Petoburgh, as the heroine swept by, making magnificent eyes at the palpably enamored Prince, while Paris murmured indiscreet admiration.

“And you, Duke, eh? Found it trying to your nerves, they tell me?” Teddy continued, twirling his golden mustache. “Such trips too costly, eh, to indulge in often?”

“Ra’!” agreed De Petoburgh, with a glance at the thousand-guinea diamond fender surmounting the most frequently photographed features in the world.