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, 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.