e native costumes, and with "Ohs!" and "Ahs!" had seen them
emerge from those robes, already arrayed for acrobatic work, in suits of
black silk tights with trunks and shoulder and wrist trimmings of red
velvet fairly stiffened with gold embroideries; and then came the act
the people liked best, because it contained the element of danger,
because in its performance a young girl and a little lad smilingly
risked life and limb to entertain them.

The two young things had climbed like cats up to the swinging bars,
high up, where the heat had risen from a thousand gas lights, and the
blood thundered in their ears, and the pulses on their temples beat like
hammers. So high, that looking down through the quivering, bluish mist,
the upturned faces of the people merged together and became like the
waters of a pale, wide pool. Their work was well advanced. With
clocklike precision they had obeyed, ever-smilingly obeyed, the orders
conveyed to them by the sharp tap of the fan their trainer held, though
to the audience the two young forms glittering in black and scarlet and
gold, poising and fluttering there, were merely playing in midair like a
pair of tropical birds.

They were beginning their great feat, in which danger was so evident
that women often cried out in terror and some covered their eyes and
would not look at all--the music even had sunken to a sort of tremor of
fear. They were for the moment hanging head downward from their
separate bars, when across the stillness came the ominous sound of
cracking, splintering wood; afterward it was known that the rung of a
chair in an upper private box had broken, but then,--but _then_! the
sound was close to the swaying girl's ear!

Believing it was her bar that was breaking, her strained nerves tore
free from all control! Driven by fear, she made a mad leap out into
space, reaching frantically for the little brown hands that a half
second later would have been ready for her, with life and safety in
their tenacious grasp.

To those who do their work in space and from high places, the distance
between life and death, between time and eternity, is often measured by
half seconds. Little Omassa had leaped too soon, the small brown hands
with power to save were not extended. She grasped the empty air, gave a
despairing cry, and as she whirled downward, had barely time to realize
that the sun had gone black out in the sky, and that the world with its
shrieking millions was thunderin