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.