e stand allotted to them. 'Ay me,
but he's grond'; and all the rest of the townsfolk said the same to
themselves or each other, but they expressed it in all the different
ways of that dignified caution common to the Scotch.

There was a series of swings, one trapeze fixed higher than another,
like a line of gigantic steps, to the very pinnacle of the tent. 'The
Signor' announced that he was going to swing himself up upon these
hanging bars until he reached the topmost, and from that he would leap
through the air down, down into the lighted abyss below, and catch a
rope that was stretched at the foot of the Grand Stand.

Merely to hear him tell what he was going to do made the crowd draw
breath with thrills of joyful horror.

Up and up he went, swinging himself with lissome grace, raising each
trapeze with the force of his swing until he could reach the one above
it.

He looked smaller as he travelled higher in his wonderful flying
progress. The little boys had not breath left now even to say, 'Ay me,
but he's grond.' There was silence among all the crowd.

To every one in all that crowd--to all except one--the spectacle was
that of a strange man performing a strange feat; one poor woman present
saw a different sight, one alone in all that crowd knew that the acrobat
was not a stranger.

In a corner of the beggars' gallery sat Betty Lamb. Dirty and clothed in
rags as she was, she held up her head at this hour with the old queenly
defiance of her youthful days. Her eyes, bleared and sunken, had
descried her son; her mother's heart, mad though all pronounced her to
be, had vibrated to the first sound of her son's voice. She knew him as
certainly as if she had seen him standing before her again, the little
lad of past years, or the infant cradled in the ambry of the ruined
chancel.

The monarchs of whom Lambetti had been glibly speaking were not more
noble in rank or more surrounded with glory in the thought of Betty Lamb
than was this hero of the circus, and he her son! What constitutes
glory? Is it not made up of the glare of lamps and the wearing of
shining clothes, the shout of a thousand voices in applause, the glance
of a thousand eyes in admiration, and the renown that spreads into the
newspapers? In the mind of Betty Lamb there was no room for gradations;
she knew glory, she knew shame; she herself had sunk to shame; but now
that was past, her son had attained to glory, and her soul went out, as
it were, fr