“You’ll take care of her?” she tremulously said, as she kissed the child’s white face over and over again. “I’ll take care of her,” said Bet, shortly. “Now stand back a bit, and let me jump.” She grasped the clinging child high over her shoulder and sprang into the air, while a sympathising roar from the crowd below greeted the action. Four men were holding aloft one of the beds, and Bet sank into the yielding mass almost as softly as if she had descended only her own height. The child was breathless and a little shaken, but quite sensible. Bet sprang to her feet and waved the rescued child in triumph in the air towards the mother far above, though the ringing cheer rising around must have carried to her the glad tidings even before Bet’s cry rang out. “She’s safe! Now jump! jump for your life!” was Bet’s eager exclamation. But the mother still clung to the window in powerless terror, and finally motioned to those below that she would try to escape by the roof. Her gesture was not understood at the moment, or a dozen voices would have been raised to warn her that that means had already been tried in vain. The building by that time was filled with smoke, and the unhappy mother had never got farther than the passage leading to the stair landing. Her body was found there, scarcely scorched, with the features calm and placid as in a gentle slumber. Little Mary, the rescued child, when shown the still form, cried out joyfully, “Mother’s only sleeping.” So she was, but it was that blissful rest which knows no troubled dreams, the last and longest that is sent to weary humanity. Bet took the child with her for that night. She had no lack of acquaintances to give her shelter, but Mary appeared to be without a friend in the world. Bet was not easily moved, but somehow that last speech of the poor mother, and her appealing gaze as she uttered it, had got imprinted in her memory—“You’ll take care of her?” Bet fancied she heard the words still, and determined to keep the child under her own eye till its nearest relatives should be sought out and found. Bet was then comparatively young—still under thirty, but she had never had a child of her own, and it was a queer sensation to her to be treading the streets with that little innocent one’s hand so trustfully reposing in her own. The talk of the child was also different from anything Bet had ever listened to; it actually seemed for the time that Bet was the child, and Mary the woman. With a gentleness quite new to her, Bet tried to explain to Mary that there was a possibility of her mother sleeping on and never waking, an idea which Mary utterly derided, though in the end she said contentedly— “If mother doesn’t wake, you’ll be my mother instead?” “No, no; that would never do,” said Bet hurriedly, and with some agitation. “I’m not good enough, and it wouldn’t be allowed.”