Mary staggered beyond Rhoda to the front of the crowd.
‘Let me under the rope!’ she cried, with a mother’s very wail in her tone—‘let me under the rope, for God’s sake! They’re my children!’
At this moment she heard a stentorian voice call to some one, ‘Wait a minute till the firemen get here, and they’ll go for him! Come back, girl, d-n you! you shan’t go!’
‘Wait? No! Not wait!’ cried Lisa, tearing herself dexterously from the policeman’s clutches, and dashing like a whirlwind up the tottering stairway before any one else could gather presence of mind to seize and detain her.
Pacific was safe on the pavement, but she had only a moment before been flung from those flaming windows, and her terrified shrieks rent the air. The crowd gave a long-drawn groan, and mothers turned their eyes away and shivered. Nobody followed Marm Lisa up that flaming path of death and duty: it was no use flinging a good life after a worthless one.
‘Fool! crazy fool!’ people ejaculated, with tears of reverence in their eyes.
‘Darling, splendid fool!’ cried Mary. ‘Fool worth all the wise ones among us!’
‘He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it!’ said a pious Methodist cobbler with a patched boot under his arm.
In the eternity of waiting that was numbered really but in seconds, a burly policeman beckoned four men and gave them a big old-fashioned counterpane that some one had offered, telling them to stand ready for whatever might happen.
‘Come closer, boys,’ said one of them, wetting his hat in a tub of water; ‘if we take a little scorchin’ doin’ this now, we may git it cooler in the next world!’