"Dear me!" murmured motherly Jean. "I hope she hasn't gone any closer. Suppose the scallops on that roof should begin to melt off."
"Oh, look!" cried Marjory. "There! In the doorway!"
All three looked just in time to see a short, not-very-slender girl in an unmistakable red cap dart in at the smoky doorway.
"Oh," groaned Jean, "it's Mabel!"
"Oh," moaned Marjory, "why did I ever tell her that there was a fire?"
"I'm afraid," hazarded Bettie, "that she's gone to Miss Bonner's room to get that money."
Bettie was right. That was exactly what Mabel had done.
All along Mabel's way hands had stretched out to stop the flying figure. But the hands were always just a little too late. You see, the owners of the tardy hands did not realize quickly enough that rash little Mabel actually meant to enter a building whose top floor was all in flames. She was fairly inside before the onlookers grasped the situation.
"How perfectly foolish!" cried Marjory, stamping her foot in helpless rage. "Of course somebody'll get her out—there's two men going in now—but how perfectly silly for her to go in at all!"
Mabel, however, was not feeling at all foolish. No, indeed. The little girl, to her own way of thinking, was doing a worthy, even a heroic, deed. She was rescuing the precious two dollars and forty-seven cents that her class had so laboriously raised to buy Miss Bonner a birthday gift. She would have liked to accomplish it in a little less spectacular manner, but, no other way being available, she had made the best of circumstances and was ignoring the crowd. She hoped, indeed, that no one had noticed her; with so much else to look at it seemed as if one small girl might easily remain unobserved. To be sure she was risking her life, the life of the only little girl that her parents possessed; but that seemed a small affair beside two dollars and forty-seven cents. The roof might fall, the cornice might drop, the huge chimney might collapse, the suffocating smoke or scorching flames might suddenly pour into that still unburned lower room. Let them! Heroes never stopped for such trifles with such a sum at stake.