“I WAS ON MY KNEES”
Like a meteor the child flashed across the space between the two trapezes; Miss Crystal caught her by her ankles.
“Ready?” called Speed, from the ground below. He had turned quite pale. I saw Jacqueline, hanging head down, smile at him from her dizzy height.
“Ready,” she said, calmly.
“Go!”
Down, down, like a falling star, flashed Jacqueline into the shallow pool, then shot to the surface, shimmering like a leaping mullet, where she played and dived and darted, while the people screamed themselves hoarse, and Speed came out, ghastly and trembling, colliding with me like a blind man.
“I wish I had never let her do it; I wish I had never brought her here—never seen her,” he stammered. “She’ll miss it some day—like Miss Claridge—and it will be murder—and I’ll have done it! Anybody but that child, Scarlett, anybody else—but I can’t bear to have her die that way—the pretty little thing!”
He let go of my arm and stood back as my lion-cages came rolling out, drawn by four horses.