Then Auntie May came up, quite out of breath, followed by Mary, to whom she said: 'Mary, I saw something like a streak of silver lightning go past Mr. Graham's room, where I was sorting his collars. Is it possible that it was poor Pet?' She looked out of the window, and told Mary she could see nothing. Freddy had got into a corner under something. 'Perhaps, Miss,' said Mary, 'she's that mangled as to be unrecognisable! The young girl that fell in my mother's street was taken up all mashed up like--' Auntie May didn't say anything at all, but just went downstairs to look if what Mary said was true. Nobody thought of preventing me and Fred, so we went along too. Our mistress first looked all over the yard, where mother, if she really _had_ fallen out of the window, was bound to have come down. But there was nothing there. Only there was a little tiny smear of blood on the edge of the tin dustbin. I heard them say so. Auntie May grew quite pale, and went to the other side of the house that was connected with the common garden. We followed her. There, sure enough, we all saw poor mother hiding under a laurel bush, and shaking like a leaf. Her lip was bleeding. She must have picked herself up when she first fell, and run all the way round by the tradesmen's entrance. 'Oh, mother,' cried Fred, who got to her first, 'what have you been and done to yourself?' 'Hush!' said mother. 'I cut my lip on the dustbin in falling, that's all. Bit my tongue, I think. Don't make a fuss--don't say anything!' But Auntie May had taken poor mother up very gently in her arms, and felt her. 'Poor, poor thing! She seems quite dazed--but no bones broken, I think?' 'Oh, Miss, them cats could fall out of Heaven and not hurt theirselves, I do believe. Cat o' nine tails, indeed--' 'Nine lives, Mary. Here, come along in and get me the whisky and a spoon!' She sat by the fire with mother spread out on her knee, and petted her and stroked her, and poured a tiny drop of whisky and water down her throat. She sat nursing her like that for two hours, mother told me afterwards, for long before that Mary had marched Freddy and me upstairs, holding us like a string of onions. Later in the day mother was brought up and put to bed, very weak and disinclined to talk. She never scolded either Freddy or me, feeling, no doubt, that she began it by romping with us, and the matter was never discussed again. I fell out of the very same window myself a year later. It was entirely my own fault and Mary's habit of being too free with her hands. I was quietly sitting on the window sill, watching the fat birds fly past the stone coping, and giving their children walking lessons up the tiles of the roof opposite, when Mary came in to do the room.