“Eh?” he said.

“It’s working off,” I repeated.  “We’re too hot and the stuff’s working off!  I’m wet through.”

He stared at me, then at the band, the wheezy rattle of whose performance was certainly going faster.  Then with a tremendous sweep of the arm he hurled the dog away from him and it went spinning upward, still inanimate, and hung at last over the grouped parasols of a knot of chattering people.  Gibberne was gripping my elbow.  “By Jove!” he cried, “I believe it is!  A sort of hot pricking and—­yes.  That man’s moving his pocket-handkerchief!  Perceptibly.  We must get out of this sharp.”

But we could not get out of it sharply enough.  Luckily, perhaps!  For we might have run, and if we had run we should, I believe, have burst into flames.  Almost certainly we should have burst into flames!  You know we had neither of us thought of that...  But before we could even begin to run the action of the drug had ceased.  It was the business of a minute fraction of a second.  The effect of the New Accelerator passed like the drawing of a curtain, vanished in the movement of a hand.  I heard Gibberne’s voice in infinite alarm.  “Sit down,” he said, and flop, down upon the turf at the edge of the Leas I sat—­scorching as I sat.  There is a patch of burnt grass there still where I sat down.  The whole stagnation seemed to wake up as I did so, the disarticulated vibration of the band rushed together into a blast of music, the promenaders put their feet down and walked their ways, the papers and flags began flapping, smiles passed into words, the winker finished his wink and went on his way complacently, and all the seated people moved and spoke.

The whole world had come alive again, was going as fast as we were, or rather we were going no faster than the rest of the world.  It was like slowing down as one comes into a railway station.  Everything seemed to spin round for a second or two, 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 lapdog sleeping quietly to the east of the bandstand should