"I will take the gloves with me. You may bring them out to my carriage on the opposite side of the street."
She was purposely humbling Liane, and the girl felt it intuitively. Her bosom heaved, and her blue eyes brimmed with dew, but she did not resent the proud command, only took up the box of gloves and followed her customer out of the store to the thickly crowded pavement and over the crossing, where a carriage waited in a throng of vehicles on the other side.
All at once something terrible happened.
Mrs. Clarke, keeping proudly in front of Liane, and not noticing closely enough her environment of vehicles and street cars, suddenly found herself right in the path of an electric car that in another moment would have crushed out her life had not two small hands reached out and hurled her swiftly aside.
Hundreds of eyes had seen the lady's imminent peril, and marked with kindling admiration the girl's heroic deed.
Without a selfish thought, though she was exposing herself to deadly danger, Liane bounded wildly upon the track and seized the dazed and immovable woman with frantic hands, dragging her by main force off the track of the car that, in the succeeding moment, whizzed by at its highest speed, just as the two, Liane and the rescued woman, fell to the ground outside the wheels.
Eager, sympathetic men bore them to the pavement, where it was found that Mrs. Clarke was in a swoon, so deathlike that it frightened Liane, who sobbed and wrung her hands.
"Oh, she is dead! The terrible shock has killed her! Can no one do anything to bring back her life? She must not die! She has a loving husband and a beautiful daughter, who would break their hearts over their terrible loss!"
"Who is she?" they asked the sobbing girl, and she answered:
"She is Mrs. Clarke, a wealthy lady of Stonecliff, and must be visiting in the city."