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, from the circumstances of her own degradation and accepted his glory as her own.

They said (the townsfolk said) that Betty Lamb had not lacked opportunity.  Ah well, God knows better than we what to each soul may be its opportunity.

Betty Lamb watched her son in his perilous upward flight, and, for the first time in her life, prayed that Heaven would forgive her misdeeds.  By some inborn instinct she assumed that it was this prayer she must pray in order to obtain that desire of her eyes, his safety.  When he reached the highest swing, when he made his leap from that awful height and caught the lower rope, there had come a change in Betty Lamb’s soul.  It had seemed hours, nay, years to her, the space of time in which he was swinging himself up and leaping down.  Perhaps, half-witted as she had been, this was in reality her life, not the other that for sixty years she had been visibly living.  She saw that his eye was fixed upon her; she knew that the kisses were thrown to her.  She rose and walked erect, in her heart a new sense of responsibility and of the value of life.

Next day in Betty Lamb’s cellar-room a shadow darkened the doorway, and her son stood before her.  He did not kiss her—­that had not been their way, even when he was an infant and she had sung her songs to him in the lonely ruin—­but he bowed to her with all the foreign graces that he had learned, just as if she were one of the queens before whom he had performed.  She feasted her eyes upon him.

He looked round upon the cellar.  ‘You must not live here any longer,’ said he.

For the first time in her life humility reigned in her heart and she resigned her gypsy freedom.  ‘I’m thinking,’ she replied modestly, ’that it’s nae fit for the mither of sich as ye are noo.’

With the minister Lambetti left money that would defray the expenses of a decent habitation for his mother, and, to the wonder of all, from that day forth the mother lived in it decently.  She was even charitable with her little store; she was even known to raise the fallen.