Satisfied that her judgment was correct, she lifted the pigeon basket on her lap, swooped over the holly bushes and dropped the basket overboard. The moment it was clear she turned steeply to watch it fall, to make sure that it dropped in the right place.
To her intense annoyance she saw that either her aim had been bad, or the parachute had not opened immediately; or it may have been that the basket had been caught in the slipstream of the airscrew. At all events it was obvious that the basket was not going to drop in the bushes; if it missed the trees towards which it was drifting it would land some distance out in the field. Furious with herself for not taking more care, she watched helplessly while the basket sank slowly earthward, to alight gracefully in the branches of a tree—a beec
