Therefore Mr. Flint duteously appeared at intervals among the elect, and appeared even to advantage. And my mother remarked, complacently, that blood will tell: he had the air! He was not expected to dance, but he was a superb cardplayer. He never told jokes, and so avoided deadly repetition. He had in a large measure that virtue the Chinese extol—the virtue of allowing others to save their faces in peace. Was it any wonder Mr. Flint's social position was soon solidly established?

He played the game as my mother forced it upon him, though at times, I think, it bored and chafed him sorely. What chafed him even more sorely was the unprecedented interest many young ladies—and some old enough to know better—suddenly evinced in entomology.

Mr. Flint almost overnight developed a savage cunning in eluding the seekers of entomological lore. One might suppose a single man would rejoice to see his drab workroom swarm with these brightly-colored fluttering human butterflies; he bore their visits as visitations, displaying the chastened resignation Job probably showed toward the latest ultra-sized carbuncle.

"Cheer up!" urged Laurence, who was watching this turn of affairs with unfeeling mirth. "The worst is yet to come. These are only the chickens: wait until the hens get on your trail!"

"Mr. Flint," said Mary Virginia one afternoon, rubbing salt into his smarting wounds, "Mr. Flint, I am so glad all the girls like you so much. You fascinate them. They say you are such a profoundly clever and interesting man, Mr. Flint! Why, some of those girls are perfectly demented about you!"

"Demented," said he, darkly, "is the right word for them when it comes down to fussing about me." Now Laurence had just caught him in his rooms, and, declaring that he looked overworked and pale, had dragged him forcibly outside on the porch, where we were now sitting. Mary Virginia, in a white skirt, sport coat, and a white felt hat which made her entrancingly pretty, had been visiting my mother and now strolled over to John Flint's, after her old fashion.

"I feel like making the greatest sort of a fuss about you myself," she said honestly. "Anyhow, I'm mighty glad girls like you. It's a good sign."

"If they do—though God knows I can't see why—I'm obliged to them, seeing it pleases you!" said Flint, without, however, showing much gratitude in eyes or voice. "To tell you the truth, it looks to me at times as if they were wished on me."

Mary Virginia tried to look horrified, and giggled instead.

"If I could only make any of them understand anything!" said the Butterfly Man desperately, "but I can't. If only they really wanted to know, I'd be more than glad to teach them. But they don't. I show them and show them and tell them and tell them, over and over and over again, and the same thing five minutes later, and they haven't even listened! They don't care. What do they take up my time and say they like my butterflies for, when they don't like them at all and don't want to know anything about them? That's what gets me!"

Laurence winked at Mary Virginia, shamelessly.

"Bugs!" said he, inelegantly. "That's what's intended to get you, you old duffer!"

"Mr. Flint," said Mary Virginia, with dancing eyes. "I don't blame those girls one single solitary bit for wanting to know all about—butterflies."

"But they don't want to know, I tell you!" Mr. Flint's voice rose querulously.

"My dear creature, I'd be stuck on you myself if I were a girl," said Laurence sweetly. "Padre, prepare yourself to say, 'Bless you, my children!' I see this innocent's finish." And he began to sing, in a lackadaisical manner, through his nose:

"Now you're married you must obey, You must be true to all you say, Live together all your life—"

No answering smile came to John Flint's lips. He made no reply to the light banter, but stiffened, and stared ahead of him with a set face and eyes into which crept an expression of anguish. Mary Virginia, with a quick glance, laid her hand on his arm.

"Don't mind Laurence and me, we're a pair of sillies. You and the Padre are too good to put up with us the way you do," she said, coaxingly. "And—we girls do like you, Mr. Flint, whether we're wished on you or not."

That seductive "we" in that golden voice routed him, horse and foot. He looked at the small hand on his arm, and his glance went swiftly to the sweet and innocent eyes looking at him with such frank friendliness.

"It's better than I deserve," he said, gently enough. "And it isn't I'm not grateful to the rest of them for liking me,—if they do. It's that I want to box their ears when they pretend to like my insects, and don't."

"Being a gentleman has its drawbacks," said I, tentatively.

"Believe me!" he spoke with great feeling. "It's nothing short of doing a life-stretch!"

The boy and girl laughed gaily. When he spoke thus it added to his unique charm. So profoundly were they impressed with what he had become, that even what he had been, as they remembered it, increased their respect and affection. That past formed for him a somber background, full of half-lights and shadows, against which he stood out with the revealing intensity of a Rembrandt portrait.

"What I came over to tell you, is that Madame says you're to stay home this evening, Mr. Flint," said Mary Virginia, comfortably. "I'm spending the night with Madame, you're to know, and we're planning a nice folksy informal sort of a time; and you're to be home."

"Orders from headquarters," commented Laurence.

"All right," agreed the Butterfly Man, briefly.

Mary Virginia shook out her white skirts, and patted her black hair into even more distractingly pretty disorder.

"I've got to get back to the office—mean case I'm working on," complained Laurence. "Mary Virginia, walk a little way with me, won't you? Do, child! It will sweeten all my afternoon and make my work easier."

"You haven't grown up a bit—thank goodness!" said Mary Virginia. But she went with him.

The Butterfly Man looked after them speculatively.

"Mrs. Eustis," he remarked, "is an ambitious sort of a lady, isn't she? Thinks in millions for her daughter, expects her to make a great match and all that. Miss Sally Ruth told me she'd heard Mrs. Eustis tried once or twice to pull off a match to suit herself, but Miss Mary Virginia wouldn't stand for it."

"Why, naturally, Mrs. Eustis would like to see the child well settled in life," said I.

"Oh, you don't have to be a Christian all the time," said he calmly. "I know Mrs. Eustis, too. She talked to me for an hour and a half without stopping, one night last week. See here, parson: Inglesby's got a roll that outweighs his record. Suppose he wants to settle down and reform—with a young wife to help him do it—wouldn't it be a real Christian job to lady's-aid him?"

I eyed him askance.

"Now there's Laurence," went on the Butterfly Man, speculatively. "Laurence is making plenty of trouble, but not so much money. No, Mrs. Eustis wouldn't faint at the notion of Inglesby, but she'd keel over like a perfect lady at the bare thought of Laurence."

"I don't see," said I, crossly, "why she should be called upon to faint for either of them. Inglesby's—Inglesby. That makes him impossible. As for the boy, why, he rocked that child in her cradle."

"That didn't keep either of them from growing up a man and a woman. Looks to me as if they were beginning to find it out, parson."

I considered his idea, and found it so eminently right, proper, and beautiful, that I smiled over it. "It would be ideal," I admitted.

"Her mother wouldn't agree with you, though her father might," he said dryly. And he asked:

"Ever had a hunch?"

"A presentiment, you mean?"

"No; a hunch. Well, I've got one. I've got a hunch there's trouble ahead for that girl."

This seemed so improbable, in the light of her fortunate days, that I smiled cheerfully.

"Well, if there should be,—here are you and I to stand by."

"Sure," said he, laconically, "that's all we're here for—to stand by."

Although it was January, the weather was again springlike. All day the air was like a golden wine, drenched in a golden sun. All day in the cedars' dark and vivid green the little wax-wings flew in and out, and everywhere the blackberry bramble that "would grace the parlors of heaven" was unfolding its crisp red leaves and white buds; and all the roads and woods were gay with the scarlet berries of the casida, which the robins love. And the nights were clear and still and starry, nights of a beauty so vital one sensed it as something alive.

Because Mary Virginia was to spend that night at the Parish House, Mrs. Eustis having been called away and the house for once free of guests, my mother had seized the occasion to call about her the youth in which her soul delighted. To-night she was as rosy and bright-eyed as any one of her girl-friends. She beamed when she saw the old rooms alive and alight with fresh and laughing faces and blithe figures. There was Laurence, with that note in his voice, that light in his eyes, that glow and glory upon him, which youth alone knows; and Dabney, with his black hair, as usual, on end, and his intelligent eyes twinkling behind his glasses; and Claire Dexter, colored like a pearl set in a cluster of laughing girls; and Mary Virginia, all in white, so beautiful that she brought a mist to the eyes that watched her. All the other gay and charming figures seemed but attendants for this supremer loveliness, snow-white, rose-red, ebony-black, like the queen's child in the fairy-tale.

The Butterfly Man had obediently put in his appearance. With the effect which a really strong character produces, he was like an insistent deep undernote that dominates and gives meaning to a lighter and merrier melody. All this bright life surged, never away from, but always toward and around him. Youth claimed him, shared itself with him, gave him lavishly of its best, because he fascinated and ensnared its fresh imagination. Though he should live to be a thousand it would ever pay homage to some nameless magic quality of spirit which was his.

"Are you writing something new? Have you found another butterfly?" asked the young things, full of interest and respect.

Well, he had promised a certain paper by a certain time, though what people could find to like so much in what he had to say about his insects—

"Because," said Dabney, "you create in us a new feeling for them. They're living things with a right to their lives, and you show us what wonderful little lives most of them are. You bring them close to us in a way that doesn't disgust us. I guess, Butterfly Man, the truth is you've found a new way of preaching the old gospel of One Father and one life; and the common sense of common folks understands what you mean, thanks you for it, likes you for it, and—asks you to tell us some more."

"Whenever a real teacher appears, always the common people hear him gladly," said I, reflectively.

"Only," said Mary Virginia, quickly, "when the teacher himself is just as uncommon as he can be, Padre." She smiled at John Flint with a sincerity that honored him.

He stood abashed and silent before this naive appreciation. It was at once his greatest happiness and his deepest pain—that open admiration of these clean-souled youngsters.

When he had gone, I too slipped away, for the still white night outside called me. I went around to that favorite retreat of mine, the battered seat shut in among spireas and syringas. I like to say my rosary out of doors. The beads slipping through my fingers soothed me with their monotonous insistent petition. Prayer brought me closer to the heart of the soft and shining night, and the big still stars.

They shall perish, but thou shalt endure; yea, all of them shall wax old as a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed; but thou art the same and thy years shall have no end.

The surety of the beautiful words brought the great overshadowing Presence near me. And I fell into a half-revery, in which the hailmarys wove themselves in and out, like threads in a pattern.

Dreamily enough, I heard the youthful guests depart, in a gale of laughter and flute-like goodnights. And I noted, too, that no light as yet shone in the Butterfly Man's rooms. Well—he would hurl himself into the work to-morrow, probably, and clear it up in an hour or two. He was like that.

My retreat was just off the path, and near the little gate between our grounds and Judge Mayne's. Thus, though I was completely hidden by the screening bushes and the shadow of the holly tree as well, I could plainly see the two who presently came down the bright open path. Of late it had given me a curious sense of comfort to see Laurence with Mary Virginia, and, I reflected, he had been her shadow recently. I liked that. His strength seemed to shield her from Hunter's ambiguous smile, from Inglesby's thoughts, even from her own mother's ambition.

I could see my girl's dear dark head outlined with a circle of moonlight as with a halo, and it barely reached my tall boy's shoulder. Her hand lay lightly on his arm, and he bent toward her, bringing his close-cropped brown head nearer hers. I couldn't have risen or spoken then, without interrupting them. I merely glanced out at them, smilingly, with my rosary in my finger.

I reached the end of a decade: "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be—"

They stopped at the gate, and fell silent for a space, the girl with her darling face uplifted. The fleecy wrap she wore fell about her slim shoulders in long lines, glinting with silver. She did not give the effect of remoteness, but of being near and dear and desirable and beautiful. The boy, looking upon her with his heart in his eyes, drew nearer.

"Mary Virginia," said he, eagerly and huskily and passionately and timidly and hopefully and despairingly, "Mary Virginia, are you going to marry anybody?"

Mary Virginia came back from the stars in the night sky to the stars in the young man's eyes. "Why, yes, I hope I am," said she lightly enough, but one saw she had been startled. "What a funny boy you are, Laurence, to be sure! You don't expect me to remain a spinster, do you?"

"You are going to be married?" This time despair was uppermost.

"I most certainly am!" said Mary Virginia stoutly. "Why, I confided that to you years and years and years ago! Don't you remember I always insisted he should have golden hair, and sea-blue eyes, and a classic brow, and a beautiful willingness to go away somewhere and die of a broken heart if I ordered him to?"

"Who is it?"

"Who is who?" she parried provokingly.

"The chap you're going to marry?"

Mary Virginia appeared to reflect deeply and anxiously. She put out a foot, with the eternal feminine gesture, and dug a neat little hole in the graveled walk with her satin toe.

"Laurence," said she. "I'm going to tell you the truth. The truth is, Laurence, that I simply hate to have to tell you the truth."

"Mary Virginia!" he stammered wretchedly. "You hate to have to tell me the truth? Oh, my dear, why? Why?"

"Because."

"But because why?"

"Because," said the dear hussy, demurely, "I don't know."

Laurence's arms fell to his sides, helplessly; he craned his neck and stared.

"Mary Virginia!" said he, in a breathless whisper.

Mary Virginia nodded. "It's really none of your business, you know," she explained sweetly; "but as you've asked me, why, I'll tell you. That same question plagues and fascinates me, too, Laurence. Why, just consider! Here's a whole big, big world full of men—tall men, short men, lean men, fat men, silly men, wise men, ugly men, handsome men, sad men, glad men, good men, bad men, rich men, poor men,—oh, all sorts and kinds and conditions and complexions of men: any one of whom I might wake up some day and find myself married to: and I don't know which one! It delights and terrifies and fascinates and amuses and puzzles me when I begin to think about it. Here I've got to marry Somebody and I don't know any more than Adam's housecat who and where that Somebody is, and he might pop from around the corner at me, any minute! It makes the thing so much more interesting, so much more like a big risky game of guess, when you don't know, don't you think?"

"No: it makes you miserable," said Laurence, briefly.

"But I'm not miserable at all!"

"You're not, because you don't have to be. But I am!"

"You? Why, Laurence! Why should you be miserable?" Her voice lost its blithe lightness; it was a little faint. She said hastily, without waiting for his reply: "I guess I'd better run in. It was silly of me to walk to the gate with you at this hour. I think Madame's calling me. Goodnight, Laurence."

"No, you don't," said he. "And it wasn't silly of you to come, either; it was dear and delightful, and I prayed the Lord to put the notion into your darling head, and He did it. And now you're here you don't budge from this spot until you've heard what I've got to say.

"Mary Virginia, I reckon you're just about the most beautiful girl in the world. You've been run after and courted and flattered and followed until it was enough to turn any girl's head, and it would have turned any girl's head but yours. You could say to almost any man alive, Come, and he'd come—oh, yes, he'd come quick. You've got the earth to pick and choose from—but I'm asking you to pick and choose me. I haven't got as much to offer you as I shall have some of these days, but I've got me myself, body and brain and heart and soul, sound to the core, and all of me yours, and I think that counts most, if you care as I do. Mary Virginia, will you marry me?"

"Oh, but, Laurence! Why—Laurence—I—indeed, I didn't know—I didn't think—" stammered the girl. "At least, I didn't dream you cared—like that."

"Didn't you? Well, all I can say is, you've been mighty blind, then. For I do care. I guess I've always cared like that, only, somehow, it's taken this one short winter to drive home what I'd been learning all my life?" said he, soberly. "I reckon I've been just like other fool-boys, Mary Virginia. That is, I spooned a bit around every good looking girl I ran up against, but I soon found out it wasn't the real thing, and I quit. Something in me knew all along I belonged to somebody else. To you. I believe now—Mary Virginia, I believe with all my heart—that I cared for you when you were squalling in your cradle."

"Oh! ... Did I squall, really?"

"Squall? Sometimes it was tummy and sometimes it was temper. Between them you yelled like a Comanche," said this astonishing lover.

Mary Virginia tilted her head back, adorably.

"It was very, very noble of you to mind me—under the circumstances," she conceded, graciously.

"Believe me, it was," agreed Laurence. "I didn't know it, of course, but even at that tender age my fate was upon me, for I liked to mind you. Even the bawling didn't daunt me, and I adored you when you resembled a squab. Yes, I was in love with you then. I'm in love with you now. My girl, my own girl, I'll go out of this world and into the next one loving you."

"Then why," she asked reproachfully, "haven't you said so?"

"Why haven't I said what?"

"Why, you know. That you—loved me, Laurence." Her rich voice had sunk to a whisper.

"Good Lord, haven't I been saying it?"

"No, you haven't! You've been merely asking me to marry you. But you haven't said a word about loving me, until this very minute!"

"But you must know perfectly well that I'm crazy about you, Mary Virginia!" said the boy, and his voice trembled with bewilderment as well as passion. "How in heaven's name could I help being crazy about you? Why, from the beginning of things, there's never been anybody else, but just you. I never even pretended to care for anybody else. No, there's nobody but you. Not for me. You're everything and all, where I'm concerned. And—please, please look up, beautiful, and tell me the truth: look at me, Mary Virginia!"

The white-clad figure moved a hair's breadth nearer; the uplifted lovely face was very close.

"Do I really mean that to you, Laurence? All that, really and truly?" she asked, wistfully.

"Yes! And more. And more!"

"I'll be the unhappiest girl in the world: I'll be the most miserable woman alive—if you ever change your mind, Laurence," said she.

There was a quivering pause. Then:

"You care?" asked the boy, almost breathlessly. "Mary Virginia, you care?" He laid his hands upon her shoulders and bent to search the alluring face.

"Laurence!" said Mary Virginia, with a tremulous, half-tearful laugh, "Laurence, it's taken this one short winter to teach me, too. And—you were mistaken, utterly mistaken about those symptoms of mine. It wasn't tummy, Laurence. And it wasn't temper. I think—I am sure—that what I was trying so hard to squall to you in my cradle was—that I cared, Laurence."

The young man's arms closed about her, and I saw the young mouths meet. I saw more than that: I saw other figures steal out into the moonlight and stand thus entwined, and one was the ghost of what once was I. That other, lost Armand De Rance, looked at me wistfully with his clear eyes; and I was very, very sorry for him, as one may be poignantly sorry for the innocent, beautiful dead. My hand tightened on my beads, and the feel of my cassock upon me, as a uniform, steadied and sustained me.

Those two had drawn back a little into the shadows as if the night had reached out its arms to them. Such a night belonged to such as these; they invest it, lend it meaning, give it intelligible speech. As for me, I was an old priest in an old cassock, with all his fond and foolish old heart melting in his breast. Youth alone is eternal and immortal. And as for love, it is of God.

"As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen." I had finished the decade. And then as one awakes from a trance I rose softly and as softly crept back to the Parish House, happy and at peace, because I had seen that which makes the morning stars rejoice when they sing together.

"Armand," said my mother, sleepily, "is that you, dear? I must have been nodding in my chair. Mary Virginia's just walked to the gate with Laurence."

"My goodness," said she, half an hour later. "What on earth can that child mean? Hadn't you better call her in, Armand?"

"No," said I, decidedly.

Laurence brought her back presently. There must have been something electrical in the atmosphere, for my mother of a sudden sat bolt upright in her chair. Women are like that. That is one of the reasons why men are so afraid of them.

"Padre, and p'tite Madame," began Laurence, "you've been like a father and mother to me—and—and—"

"And we thought you ought to know," said Mary Virginia.

"My children!" cried my mother, ecstatically, "it is the wish of my heart! Always have I prayed our good God to let this happen—and you see?"

"But it's a great secret: it's not to be breathed, yet," said Mary Virginia.

"Except, of course, my father—" began Laurence.

"And the Butterfly Man," I added, firmly. Well knowing none of us could keep such news from him.

"As for me," said my mother, gloriously reckless, "I shall open one of the two bottles of our great-grandfather's wine!" The last time that wine had been opened was the day I was ordained. "Armand, go and bring John Flint."

When I reached his rooms Kerry was whining over a huddled form on the porch steps. John Flint lay prone, his arms outstretched, horribly suggestive of one crucified. At my step he struggled upright. I had my arms about him in another moment.

"Are you hurt? sick? John, John, my son, what is it? What is it?"

"No, no, I'm all right. I—was just a little shaky for the minute. There, there, don't you be scared, father." But his voice shook, and the hand I held was icy cold.

"My son, my dear son, what is wrong with you?"

He controlled himself with a great effort. "Oh, I've been a little off my feed of late, father, that's all. See, I'm perfectly all right, now." And he squared his shoulders and tried to speak in his natural voice.

"My mother wanted you to come over for a few minutes, there's something you're to know. But if you don't feel well enough—"

He seemed to brace himself. "Maybe I know it already. However, I'm quite able to walk over and hear—anything I'm to be told," he said, composedly.

In the lighted parlor his face showed up pale and worn, and his eyes hollow. But his smile was ready, his voice steady, and the hand which received the wine Mary Virginia herself brought him, did not tremble.

"It is to our great, great happiness we wish you to drink, old friend," said Laurence. Intoxicated with his new joy, glowing, shining, the boy was magnificent.

The Butterfly Man turned and looked at him; steadily, deliberately, a long, searching, critical look, as if measuring him by a new standard. Laurence stood the test. Then the man's eyes came back to the girl, rose-colored, radiant, star-eyed, and lingered upon her. He arose, and held up the glass in which our old wine seemed to leap upward in little amber-colored flames.

"You'll understand," said the Butterfly Man, "that I haven't the words handy to my tongue to say what's in my heart. I reckon I'd have to be God for awhile, to make all I wish for you two come true." There was in look and tone and manner something so sweet and reverent that we were touched and astonished.

When my mother had peremptorily sent Laurence home to the judge, and carried Mary Virginia off to talk the rest of the night through, I went back to his rooms with John Flint, in spite of the lateness of the hour: for I was uneasy about him.

I think my nearness soothed him. For with that boyish diffident gesture of his he reached over presently and held me by the sleeve.

"Parson," he asked, abruptly, "is a man born with a whole soul, or just a sort of shut-up seed of one? Is one given him free, or has he got to earn and pay for one before he gets it, parson? I want to know."

"We all want to know that, John Flint. And the West says Yes, and the East, No."

"I've been reading a bit," said he, slowly and thoughtfully. "I wanted to hear what both sides had to say. Paul is pretty plain, on his side of the fence. But, parson, some chaps that talk as if they knew quite as much as Paul does, say you don't get anything in this universe for nothing; you have to pay for what you get. As near as I can figure it out, you land here with a chance to earn yourself. You can quit or you can go on—it's all up to you. If you're a sport and play the game straight, why, you stand to win yourself a water-tight fire-proof soul. Because, you see, you've earned and paid for it, parson. That sounded like good sense to me. Looked to me as if I was sort of doing it myself. But when I began to go deeper into the thing, why, I got stuck. For I can't deny I'd been doing it more because I had to than because I wanted to. But—which-ever way it is, I'm paying! Oh, yes, I'm paying!"

"Ah, but so is everybody else, my son," said I, sadly. "... each in his own coin. ... But after all isn't oneself worth while, whatever the cost?"

"I don't know," said he. "That's where I'm stuck. Is the whole show a skin game or is it worth while? But, parson, whatever it is, you pay a hell of a price when you buy yourself on the instalment plan, believe me!" his voice broke, as if on a suppressed groan. "If I could get it over and done with, pay for my damned little soul in one big gob, I wouldn't mind. But to have to buy what I'm buying, to have to pay what I'm paying—"

"You are ill," said I, deeply concerned. "I was afraid of this."

He laughed, more like a croak.

"Sure I'm sick. I'm sick to the core of me, but you and Westmoreland can't dose me. Nobody can do anything for me, I have to do it myself or go under. That's part of paying on the instalment plan, too, parson."

"I don't think I exactly understand—"

"No, you wouldn't. You paid in a lump sum, you see. And you got what you got. Whatever it was that got you, parson, got the best of the bargain." His voice softened.

"You are talking in parables," said I, severely.

"But I'm not paying in parables, parson. I'm paying in me," said he, grimly. And he laughed again, a laugh of sheer stark misery that raised a chill echo in my heart. His hand crept back to my sleeve.

"I—can't always can the squeal," he whispered.

"If only I could help you!" I grieved.

"You do," said he, quickly. "You do, by being you. I hang on to you, parson. And say, look here! Don't you think I'm such a hog I can't find time to be glad other folks are happy even if I'm not. If there's one thing that could make me feel any sort of way good, it's to know those two who were made for each other have found it out. It sort of makes it look as if some things do come right, even if others are rotten wrong. I'm glad till it hurts me. I'd like you to believe that."

"I do believe it. And, my son! if you can find time to be glad of others' happiness, without envy, why, you're bound to come right, because you're sound at the core."

"You reckon I'm worth my price, then, parson?"

"I reckon you're worth your price, whatever it is. I don't worry about you, John Flint."

And somehow, I did not. I left him with Kerry's head on his knee. His hand was humanly warm again, and the voice in which he told me goodnight was bravely steady. He sat erect in his doorway, fronting the night like a soldier on guard. If he were buying his soul on the instalment plan I was sure he would be able to meet the payments, whatever they were, as they fell due.



CHAPTER XIV

THE WISHING CURL

With February the cold that the Butterfly Man had wished for came with a vengeance. The sky lost its bright blue friendliness and changed into a menacing gray, the gray of stormy water. Overnight the flowers vanished, leaving our gardens stripped and bare, and our birds that had been so gay were now but sorry shivering balls of ruffled feathers, with no song left in them. When rain came the water froze in the wagon-ruts, and ice-covered puddles made street-corners dangerous.

This intense cold, damp, heavy, penetrating, coming upon the heels of the unseasonably warm weather, seemed to bring to a head all the latent sickness smoldering in the mill-parish, for it suddenly burst forth like a conflagration. If the Civic League had not already done so much to better conditions in the poorer district, we must have had a very serious epidemic, as Dr. Westmoreland bluntly told the Town Council.

As it was, things were pretty bad for awhile, and the inevitable white hearse moved up and down, stopping now at this door, now at that. In one narrow street, I remember, it moved in the exact shape of a figure eight within the week. I do not like to recall those days. I buried the children with the seal of Holy Mother Church upon their innocence; I repeated over them "The Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken away"—and knew in my heart that it was man-made want, the greed of money-madness, that had taken them untimely out of their mothers' laps. And the earth was like iron; it opened unwillingly to receive the babes of the poor.

In and out of stricken mill-houses and shabby shacks, as regularly as Westmoreland and I, whose business and duty lay there, came John Flint. He made no effort to comfort parents, although these seemed to derive a curious consolation from his presence. He did not even come because he wanted to; he came because the children begged to see the Butterfly Man and one may not refuse a sick child. He had made friends with them, made toys for them; and now he saw dull eyes brighten at his approach and pale faces try to smile; languid and fever-hot hands were held out to him. All the force of the affection of young children, their dazzling faith, the almost unthinkable power upon their plastic minds of those whom they trust, came home to him. He could not, in such an hour, accept lightly, with a careless smile, the fact that children loved him. And once or twice a small hand that clung to him grew cold in his clasp, and under his eyes a child's closed to this world.

Now, something that saw straight, thought like a naked sword-blade, ate like a testing acid into shams and hated evasions and half-truths and subterfuges, had of late been showing more and more behind John Flint's reserve; and I think it might have hardened into a mentality cold and bright and barren, hard and cutting as a diamond, had it not been for the children whom he had to see suffer and die.

There was one child of whom he was particularly fond—a child with the fairest of fair hair, deep and sweet blue eyes, and the quickest, shyest, most fleeting of smiles to lighten flashingly her small pale serious face. She had been one of the first of the mill folks' children to make friends with the Butterfly Man. She used to watch for him, and then, holding on to one of his fingers, she liked to trot sedately down the street beside him.

This child's going was sudden and rather painful. Westmoreland did what he could, but there was no stamina in that frail body, so her's had been one of the small hands to fall limp and still out of John Flint's. The doll he had made for her lay in the crook of her arm; it had on a red calico dress, very garish in the gray room, and against the child's whiteness.

Westmoreland stood, big and compassionate, at the foot of the bed. His ruddy face showed wan and behind his glasses his gray tired eyes winked and blinked.

"There must be," said the Doctor, as if to himself, "some eternal vast reservoir somewhere, that stores up all this terrible total of unnecessary suffering—the cruel and needless suffering inflicted upon children and animals, in particular. Perhaps it's a spiritual serum used for the saving of the race. Perhaps races higher up than we use it—as we use rabbits and guinea-pigs. No, no, nothing's wasted; there's a forward end to pain, somewhere." He looked down at the child and shook his head doubtfully:

"But when all is said and done," he muttered, "what do such as these get out of it? Nothing—so far as we can see. They're victims, they and the innocent beasts, thrust into a world which tortures and devours them. Why? Why? Why?"

"There is nothing to do but leave that everlasting Why to God," said I, painfully.

The Butterfly Man looked up and one saw that cold sword-straight, diamond-hard something in his eyes:

"Parson," said he, grimly, "you're a million miles off the right track—and you know it. Leaving things to God—things like poor kids dying because they're gouged out of their right to live—is just about as rotten stupid and wrong as it can well be. God's all right; he does his part of the job. You do yours, and what happens? Why, my butterflies answer that! I'm punk on your catechism, and if this is all it can teach I hope I die punk on it; but as near as I can make out, original sin is leaving things like this"—and he looked at his small friend with her doll on her arm—"to God, instead of tackling the job yourself and straightening it out."

The child's mother, a gaunt creature without a trace of youth left in her, although she could not have been much more than thirty, shambled over to a chair on the other side of the bed. She wore a faded red calico wrapper—a scrap of it had made the doll's frock—and a blue-checked apron with holes in it. Her hair was drawn painfully back from her forehead, and there was a wispy fringe of it on the back of her scraggy neck. In her dull eyes glimmered nothing but the innate uneasiness of those who are always in need, and her mouth had drawn itself into the shape of a horseshoe. There is no luck in a horseshoe hung thus on a woman's face. One might fancy she felt no emotion, her whole demeanor was so apathetic; but of a sudden she leaned over and took up one of the thick shining curls; half smiling, she began to wrap it about her finger.

"I useter be right smart proud o' Louisa's hair," she remarked in a drawling, listless voice. "She come by it from them uppidy folks o' her pa's. I've saw her when she wasn't much more 'n hair an' eyes, times her pa was laid up with the misery in his chest, an' me with nothin' but piecework weeks on end.

"... She was a cu'rus kind o' child, Louisa was. She sort o' 'spicioned things wasn't right, but you think that child ever let a squeal out o' her? Not her! Lemme tell you-all somethin', jest to show what kind o' a heart that child had, suhs."

With a loving and mothering motion she moved the bright curl about and about her hard finger. She spoke half intimately, half garrulously; and from the curl she would lift her faded eyes to the Butterfly Man's.

"'T was a Sarrerday night, an' I was a-walkin' up an' down, account o' me bein' awful low in the mind.

"'Ma,' says Louisa, 'I'm reel hungry to-night. You reckon I could have a piece o' bread with butter on it? I wisht I could taste some bread with butter on it,' says she.

"'Darlin',' says I, turrible sad, 'Po' ma c'n give yo' the naked bread an' thanks to God I got even that to give,' I says. 'But they ain't a scrap o' butter in this house, an' no knowin' how to git any. Oh, darlin', ma's so sorry!'

"She looks up with that quick smile o' her'n. Yes, suh, Mr. Flint, she ups and smiles. 'You don't belong to be sorry any, ma,' says she, comfortin'. 'Don't you mind none at all. Why, ma, darlin', I just love naked bread without no butter on it!' says she. My God, Mr. Flint, I bust out a-cryin' in her face. Seemed like I natchelly couldn't stand no mo'!" And smiling vaguely with her poor old down-curved mouth, she went on fingering the curl.

"Will you-all look a' that!" she murmured, with pride. "Even her hair's lovin', an' sort o' holds on like it wants you should touch it. My Lord o' glory, I'm glad her pa ain't livin' to see this day! He had his share o' misery, po' man, him dyin' o' lung-fever an' all....

"Six head o' young ones we'd had, me an' him. An' they'd all dropped off. Come spring, an' one'd be gone. I kep' a-comfortin' that man best I could they was better off, angels not bein' pindlin' an' hungry an' barefoot, an' thanks be, they ain't no mills in heaven. But their pa he couldn't see it thataway nohow. He was turrible sot on them children, like us pore folks gen'rally is. They was reel fine-lookin' at first.

"When all the rest of 'em had went, her pa he sort o' sot his heart on Louisa here. 'For we ain't got nothin' else, ma,' says he. 'An' please the good Lord, we're a-goin' to give this one book-learnin' an' sich, an' so be she'll miss them mills,' he says. 'Ma, less us aim to make a lady o' our Louisa. Not that the Lord ain't done it a'ready,' says her pa, 'but we got to he'p Him keep on an' finish the job thorough.' An' here's him an' her both gone, an' me without a God's soul belongin' to me this day! My God, Mr. Flint, ain't it something turrible the things happens to us pore folks?"

The Butterfly Man looked from her to Westmoreland and me: doctor of bodies, doctor of souls, naturalist, what had we to say to this woman stripped of all? But she, with the greater wisdom of the poor, spoke for herself and for us. A sort of veiled light crept into her sodden face.

"It ain't I ain't grateful to you-all," said she. "God knows I be. You was good to Louisa. Doctor, you remember that day you give her a ride in your ottermobile an' forgot to bring her home for more 'n a hour? My, but that child was happy!"

"'Ma,' says she when I come home that night, 'you know what heaven is?'

"'Child,' says I, 'folks like me mostly knows what it ain't.'

"'I beat you, ma!' says she, clappin' her hands. 'Heaven ain't nothin' much but country an' roads an' trees an' butterflies, an' things like that,' says she. 'An' God's got ottermobiles, plenty an' plenty ottermobiles, an' you ride free in 'em long's you feel like it, 'cause that's what they's for. An', ma,' says she, 'God's, showfers is all of 'em Dr. Westmorelands and Mr. Flints.' Yea, suh, you-all been mighty kind to Louisa. But I reckon," she drawled, "it was Mr. Flint Louisa loved best, him bein' a childern's kind o' man, an' on account o' Loujaney." She laid a hand upon the rag doll lying on the little girl's arm.

"From the first day you give her that doll, Mr. Flint—which she named Loujaney, for her an' me both—that child ain't been parted from it." She smiled down at the two. I could almost have prayed she would weep instead. It would have been easier to bear.

"The King's Daughters, they give her a mighty nice doll off their Christmas tree last year, but Louisa, she didn't take to it like she done to Loujaney.

"'That doll's jest a visitin' lady,' says she, 'but Loujaney, she's my child. Mr. Flint made her a-purpose for me, same's God made me for you, ma, an' she's mine by bornation. I can live with Loujaney. I ain't a mite ashamed afore her when we ain't got nothin', but I turn 'tother's face to the wall so she won't know. Loujaney's pore folks same's you an' me, an' she knows prezac'ly how 't is. That's why I love her so much.

"An' day an' night," resumed the drawling voice, "them two's been together. She jest lived an' et an' slept with that doll. If ever a doll gits to grow feelin's, Loujaney's got 'em. I s'pose I'd best give that visitin' doll to some child that wants it bad, but I ain't got the heart to take Loujaney away from her ma. I'm a-goin' to let them two go right on sleepin' together.

"Mr. Flint, suh, seein' Louisa liked you so much, an' it's you she'd want to have it—" she leaned over, pushed the thick fair hair aside, and laid her finger upon a very whimsy of a curl, shorter, paler, fairer than the others, just above the little right ear.

"Her pa useter call that the wishin' curl," said she, half apologetically. "You see, suh, he was a comical sort of man, an' a great hand for pertendin' things. I never could pertend. Things is what they is an' pertendin' don't change 'em none. But him an' her was different. That's how come him to pertend the Lord'd put the rainbow's pot o' gold in Louisa's hair with a wish in it, an' that ridic'lous curl one side her head, like a mark, was the wishin' curl. He'd pertend he could pull it twict an' say whisperin', 'Bickery-ickery-ee—my wish is comin' to me,' an' he'd git it. An' she liked to pertend 'twas so an' she could wish things on it for me an' git 'em.... Clo'es an' shoes an' fire an' cake an' beefsteak an' butter an' stayin' home.... Just pertendin', you see.

"Mr. Flint, suh, I ain't got a God's thing any more to wish for, but you bein' the sort o' man you are, I'd rather 'twas you had Louisa's wishin' curl, to remember her by." Snip! went the scissors; and there it lay, pale as the new gold of spring sunlight, curling as young grape-tendrils, in the Butterfly Man's open palm.

"Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee," said the great Apostle to the lame man who lay beside the gate of the temple that is called, Beautiful.

"I ain't got nothin' else," said the common mill-woman; and laid in John Flint's hand Louisa's wishing-curl.

He stared at it, and turned as pale as the child on her pillow. The human pity of the thing, its sheer stark piercing simplicity, squeezed his heart as with a great hand.

"My God!" he choked. "My—God!" and a rending sob tore loose from his throat. For the first time in his life he had to weep; uncontrolled, unashamed, childlike, fatherly, brotherly. For he had experienced, unselfishly, on account of one of the humblest of God's creatures, one of the great divine emotions. And when that happens to a man it is as if his soul were winnowed by the wind of an archangel's wings.

Westmoreland and I slipped out and left him with the woman. She would know what further thing to say to him.

Outside in the bleak bitter street, the Doctor laid his hand on my shoulder. He winked his eyes rapidly. "Father," said he, earnestly, "when I witness such a thing as we've seen this morning, I do not lose faith. I gain it." And he gripped me heartily with his big gloved hand. "Tell John Flint," he added, "that sometimes a rag doll is a mighty big thing for a man to have to his credit." Then he was gone, with a tear freezing on his cheek.

"Angels," John Flint had said more than once, "are not middle-aged doctors with shoulders on them like a barn-door, and ribs like a dray; angels don't have bald heads and wear a red tie and tan shoes. But I'd pass them all up, from Gabriel down, wings and tailfeathers, for one Walter Westmoreland."

I would, too. And I walked along, thinking of what I had just witnessed; sensing its time value. To those slight and fragile things which had, for John Flint, outweighed the scales of evil—a gray moth, a butterfly's wing, a bird's nest—I added a child's fair hair, and a rag doll that was going to sleep with its ma.

There were but few people on the freezing streets, for folks preferred to stay indoors and hug the fire. Fronting the wind, I walked with a lowered head, and thus collided with a lady who turned a corner at the same time I did.

"Don't apologize, Padre," said Mary Virginia, for it was she. "It was my fault—I wasn't looking where I was going."

"Are you by any chance bound for the Parish House? Because my mother will be on her way to a poor thing that's just lost her only child. Where have you been these past weeks? I haven't seen you for ages."

"Oh, I've been rather busy, too, Padre. And I haven't been quite well—" she hesitated. I thought I understood. For, possibly from some servant who had overheard Mrs. Eustis expostulating with her daughter, the news of Mary Virginia's unannounced engagement had sifted pretty thoroughly throughout the length and breadth of Appleboro; a town where an unfledged and callow rumor will start out of a morning and come home to roost at night with talons and tailfeathers.

That Mary Virginia had all James Eustis's own quiet will-power, everybody knew. She would not, perhaps, marry Laurence in the face of her mother's open opposition. Neither would she marry anybody else to please her mother in defiance of her own heart. There was a pretty struggle ahead, and Appleboro took sides for and against, and settled itself with eager expectancy to watch the outcome.

So I concluded that Mary Virginia had not been having a pleasant time. Indeed, it struck me that she was really unwell. One might even suspect she had known sleepless nights, from the shadowed eyes and the languor of her manner.

Just then, swinging down the street head erect, shoulders square, the freezing weather only intensifying his glowing fairness, came Howard Hunter. The man was clear red and white. His gold hair and beard glittered, his bright blue eyes snapped and sparkled. He seemed to rejoice in the cold, as if some Viking strain in him delighted in its native air.

As he paused to greet us a coldness not of the weather crept into Mary Virginia's eyes. She did not speak, but bowed formally. Mr. Hunter, holding her gaze for a moment, lifted his brows whimsically and smiled; then, bowing, he passed on. She stood looking after him, her lips closed firmly upon each other.

Tucking her hand in my arm, she walked with me to the Parish House gate. No, she said, she couldn't come in. But I was to give her regards to the Butterfly Man, and her love to Madame.

"Parson," the Butterfly Man asked me that night, "have you seen Mary Virginia recently?"

"I saw her to-day."

"I saw her to-day, too. She looked worried. She hasn't been here lately, has she?"

"No. She hasn't been feeling well. I hear Mrs. Eustis has been very outspoken about the engagement, and I suppose that's what worries Mary Virginia."

"I don't think so. She knew she had to go up against that, from the first. She's more than a match for her mother. There's something else. Didn't I tell you I had a hunch there was going to be trouble? Well, I've got a hunch it's here."

"Nonsense!" said I, shortly.

"I know," said he, stubbornly. And he added, irrelevantly: "It's generally known, parson, that Eustis will be nominated. Inglesby's managed to gain considerable ground, thanks to Hunter, and folks say if it wasn't for Eustis he'd win. As it is, he'll be swamped. I hear he was thunderstruck when he got wind of what Mayne was going to play against him—for he knows Laurence brought Eustis out. Inglesby's mighty sore. He's the sort that hates to have to admit he can't get what he wants."

"Then he'd better save himself the trouble of having to put it to the test," said I.

"I'm wondering," said John Flint. "I wish I hadn't got that hunch!"

I did not see Mary Virginia again for some time. Just then I moved breathlessly in a horrid round of sickbeds, for the wave had reached its height; already it had swept seventeen of my flock out of time into eternity.

I came home on one of the last of those heavy evenings, to find Laurence waiting for me in my study. He was standing in the middle of the room, his hands clasped behind his back.

"Padre," said he by way of greeting, "have you seen Mary Virginia lately? Has Madame?"

"No, except for a chance meeting one morning on the street. But she has been sending me help right along, bless her."

"Has Madame heard anything from her, Padre?"

"No, I don't think so. But we've been frightfully busy of late, you understand."

"No, neither of you know," said Laurence, in a low voice. "You wouldn't know. Padre, I—don't look at me like that, please; I'm not ill. But, without reason—swear to you before God, without any reason whatever, that I can conjure up—she has thrown me over, jilted me—Mary Virginia, Padre! And I'm to forget her. I'm to forget her, you understand? Because she can't marry me." He spoke in a level, quiet, matter of fact voice. Then laughter shook him like a nausea.

I laid my hand upon him. "Now tell me," said I, "what you have to tell me."

"I've really told you all I know," said Laurence. "Day before yesterday she sent for me. You can't think how happy it made me to have her send for me, how happy I've been since I knew she cared! I felt as if there wasn't anything I couldn't do. There was nothing too great to be accomplished—

"Well, I went. She was standing in the middle of the long drawing-room. There was a fire behind her. She was so like ice I wonder now she didn't thaw. All in white, and cold, and frozen. And she said she couldn't marry me. That's why she had sent for me—to tell me that she meant to break our engagement: Mary Virginia!

"I wanted to know why. I was within my rights in asking that, was I not? And she wouldn't let me get close to her, Padre. She waved me away. I got out of her that there were reasons: no, she wouldn't say what those reasons were; but there were reasons. Her reasons, of course. When I began to talk, to plead with her, she begged me not to make things harder for her, but to be generous and go away. She just couldn't marry me, didn't I understand? So I must release her."

He hung his head. The youth of him had been dimmed and darkened.

"And you said—?"

"I said," said Laurence simply, "that she was mine as much as I was hers, and that I'd go just then because she asked me to, but I was coming back. I tried to see her again yesterday. She wouldn't see me. She sent down word she wasn't at home. But I knew all along she was. Mary Virginia, Padre!

"I tried again. I haven't got any pride where she's concerned. Why should I? She's—she's my soul, I think. I can't put it into words, because you can't put feelings into words, but she's the pith of life. Then I wrote her. Half a dozen times I wrote her. I got down to the level of bribing the colored maid to take the notes to her, one every hour, like a medicine, and slip them under her door. I know she received them. I repeated it again to-day. It's Mary Virginia at stake, and I can't take chances, can I? And this afternoon she sent this.

"Oh, Laurence, be generous and spare me the torment of questions. So far you have not reproached me; spare me that, too! Don't you understand? I cannot marry you. Accept the inevitable as I do. Forgive me and forget me. M.V.E."

The writing showed extreme nervousness, haste, agitation.

"Well?" said Laurence. But I stood staring at the crumpled bit of paper. I knew what I knew. I knew what my mother had thought fit to reveal to me of the girl's feelings: Mary Virginia had been very sure. I remembered what my eyes had seen, my ears heard. I was sure she was faithful, for I knew my girl. And yet—

There came back to me a morning in spring and I riding gaily off in the glad sunshine, full of faith and of hope. To find what I had found. I handed the note back, in silence.

"Oh, why, why, why?" burst out the boy, in a gust of acute torment. "For God's sake, why? Think of her eyes and her mouth, Padre—and her forehead like a saint's—No, she's not false. God never made such eyes as hers untruthful. I believe in her. I've got to believe in her. I tell you, I belong to her, body and soul." He began to walk up and down the room, and his shoulders twitched, as if a lash were laid over them. "I could forgive her for not loving me, if she doesn't love me and found it out, and said so. Women change, do they not? But—to take a man that loves her—and tear his living soul to shreds and tatters—

"If she's a liar and a jilt, who and what am I to believe? Why should she do it, Padre—to me that love her? Oh, my God, think of it: to be betrayed by the best beloved! No, I can't think it. This isn't just any light girl: this is Mary Virginia!"

I put my hand on his shoulder. He is a head over me, and once again as broad, perhaps. We two fell into step. I did not attempt to counsel or console.

"Here I come like a whining kid, Padre," said he, remorsefully, "piling my troubles upon your shoulders that carry such burdens already. Forgive me!"

"I shouldn't be able to forgive you if you didn't come," said I. Up and down the little room, up and down, the two of us.

Came a light tap at the door. The Butterfly Man's head followed it.

"Didn't I hear Laurence talking?" asked he, smiling. The smile froze at sight of the boy's face. He closed the door, and leaned against it.

"What's wrong with her?" he asked, quickly. It did not occur to us to question his right to ask, or to wonder how he knew.

In a dull voice Laurence told him. He held out his hand for the note, read it in silence, and handed it back.

"What do you make of it?" I asked.

"Trouble," said he, curtly; and he asked, reproachfully, "Don't you know her, both of you, by this time?"

"I know," said Laurence, "that she has sent me away from her."

"Because she wants to, or because she thinks she has to?" asked John Flint.

"Why should she do so unless it pleased her?" I asked sorrowfully.

His eyes flashed. "Why, she's herself! A girl like her couldn't play anybody false because there's no falseness in her to do it with. What are you going to do about it?"

"There is nothing to do," said Laurence, "but to release her; a gentleman can do no less."

John Flint's lips curled. "Release her? I'd hang on till hell froze over and caught me in the ice! I'd wait. I'd write and tell her she didn't need to make herself unhappy about me, I was unhappy enough about her for the two of us, because she didn't trust me enough to tell me what her trouble was, so I could help her. That first and always I was her friend, right here, whenever she needed me and whatever she needed me for. And I'd stand by. What else is a man good for?"

"I believe," said I, "that John Flint has given you the right word, Laurence. Just hold fast and be faithful."

Laurence lifted his haggard face. "There isn't any question of my being faithful to her, Padre. And I couldn't make myself believe that she's less so than I. What Flint says tallies with my own intuition. I'll write her to-night." He laid his hand on John Flint's arm. "You're all right, Bughunter," said he, earnestly. "'Night, Padre." Then he was gone.

"Do you think," said John Flint, when he had rejected every conjecture his mind presented as the possible cause of Mary Virginia's action, "that Inglesby could be at the bottom of this?"

"I think," said I, "that you have an obsession where that man is concerned. He is a disease with you. Good heaven, what could Inglesby possibly have to do with Mary Virginia's affairs?"

"That's what I'm wondering. Well, then, who is it?"

"Perhaps," said I, unwillingly, "it is Mary Virginia herself."

"Forget it! She's not that sort."

"She is a woman."

"Ain't it the truth, though?" he jeered. "What a peach of a reason for not acting like herself, looking like herself, being like herself! She's a woman! So are all the rest of the folks that weren't born men, if you'll notice. They're women; we're men: and both of us are people. Get it?"

"I get it," said I, annoyed. "Your attitude, John Flint, is a vulgar platitude. And permit me to—"

"I'll permit you to do anything except get cross," said he, quickly. The ghost of a smile touched his face. "Being bad-tempered, parson, suits you just about as well as plaid pants and a Hello Bill button."

"I am a human being," I began, frigidly.

"And I'm another. And so is Mary Virginia. And there we are, parson. I'm troubled. I don't like the looks of things. It's no use telling myself this is none of my business; it is very much my business. You remember ... when I came here ..." he hesitated, for this is a subject we do not like to discuss, "what you were up against ... parson, I've thought you must have been caught and crucified yourself, and learned things on the cross, and that's why you held on to me. But with the kids, it was different—particularly the little girl. The first thing I ever got from her was a lovely look, the first time ever I set eyes on her she came with an underwing moth. I'd be a poor sort that wouldn't be willing to be spilt like water and scattered like dust, if she needed me now, wouldn't I?"

"But," said I, perplexed, "what can you do? A young lady has seen fit to break her engagement; young ladies often see fit to do that, my dear fellow. This isn't an uncommon case. Also, one doesn't interfere in a lady's private affairs, not even when one is an old priest who has loved her since her childhood, nor yet a Butterfly Man who is her devoted friend. Don't you see?"

"I see there's something wrong," said he, doggedly.

"Perhaps. But that doesn't give one the right to pry into something she evidently doesn't wish to reveal," I told him.

"I suppose," said he, heavily, "you are right. But if you hear anything, let me know, won't you?"

I promised; but I found out nothing, save that it had not been Mrs. Eustis who influenced her daughter's action. This came out in a call Mrs. Eustis made at the Parish House.

"My dear," she told my mother, "when she told me she had broken that engagement, I was astounded! But I can't say I wasn't pleased. Laurence is a dear boy; and his family's as good as ours—no one can take that away from the Maynes. But Mary Virginia should have done better.

"I quarreled with her, argued with her, pleaded with her. I cried and cried. But she's James Eustis to the life—you might as well try to move the Rock of Gibraltar. Then one morning she came to my room and told me she found she couldn't marry Laurence! And she had already told him so, and broken her engagement, and I wasn't to ask her any questions. I didn't. I was too glad."

"And—Laurence—?" asked my mother, ironically.

"Laurence? Laurence is a man. Men get over that sort of thing. I've known a man to be perfectly mad over his wife—and marry, six months after her death. They're like that. They always get over it. It's their nature."

"Let us hope, then, for Laurence's peace of mind," said my mother, "that he'll get over it—like all the rest of his sex. Though I shouldn't call Laurence fickle, or faithless, if you ask me."

"He is a very fine boy. I always liked him myself and James adores him. If I had two or three daughters, I'd be willing to let one of them marry Laurence—after awhile. But having only one I must say I want her to do better."

"I see," said my mother. To me she said later:

"And yet, Armand, although I condemn it, I can quite appreciate Mrs. Eustis's point of view. I was somewhat like that myself, once upon a time."

"You? Never!"

My mother smiled tolerantly.

"Ah, but you never offered me a daughter-in-law I did not relish. It was much easier for me to bear the Church!"

That night I went over to John Flint's, for I thought that the fact of Mary Virginia's deliberately choosing to act as she had done would in a measure settle the matter and relieve his anxiety.

There was a cedar wood fire before which Kerry lay stretched; little white Pitache, grown a bit stiff of late, occupied a chair he had taken over for his own use and from which he refused to be dislodged. Major Cartwright had just left, and the room still smelt of his cigar, mingling pleasantly with the clean smell of the burning cedar.

On the table, within reach of his hand, was ranged the Butterfly Man's entire secular library: Andrew Lang's translation of Homer; Omar; Richard Burton's Kasidah; Saadi's Gulistan, over which he chuckled; Robert Burns; Don Quixote; Joan of Arc, and Huckleberry Finn; Treasure Island; the Bible Miss Sally Ruth had given him—I never could induce him to change it for my own Douai version—; one or two volumes of Shakespeare; the black Obituary Book, grown loathsomely fat; and the "Purely Original Verse of James Gordon Coogler," which a light-minded professor of mathematics at the University of South Carolina had given him, and in which he evilly delighted. Other books came and went, but these remained. To-night it was the Bible which lay open, at the Book of Psalms.

"Look at this." He laid his finger on a verse of the nineteenth: "The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple."

"The times I've turned that over in my mind, out in the woods by night and the fields by day!" said the Butterfly Man, musingly. "The simple is me, parson, and the testimony is green things growing, and butterflies and moths, and Kerry, and people, and trouble, and Louisa's hair, and—well, about everything, I reckon.

"Yes, everything's testimony, and it can make wise the simple—if he's not too simple. I reckon, parson, the simple is lumped in three lots—the fool for a little while, the fool for half the day, and the life-everlasting twenty-four-hours-a-day, dyed-in-the-wool damn-fool.

"Some of us are the life-everlasting kind, the kind that used to make old man Solomon wall his eyes and throw fits and then get busy and hatch out proverbs with stings in their tails. A lot of us are half-the-day fools; and all the rest are fools for a little while. There's nobody born that hasn't got his times and seasons for being a fool for a while. But that's the sort of simple the testimony slams some sense into. Like me," he added earnestly, and closed the great Book.

I told him presently what I had heard; that, as he surmised, Mrs. Eustis was not responsible for Mary Virginia's change of mind—or perhaps of heart. He nodded. But he offered no comment. Now, since I had come in, he had been from time to time casting at me rather speculative and doubtful glances. He drummed on the table, smiled sheepishly, and presently reached for a package, unwrapped it, and laid before me a book.

'"The Relation of Insect Life to Human Society,'" I read, "By John Flint and Rev. Armand Jean De Rance. With notes and drawings by Father De Rance." It bore the imprint of a great publishing house.

"You suggested it more than once," said John Flint. "Off and on, these two years, I've been working on it. All the notes I particularly asked you for were for this. Mighty fine and acute notes they are, too—you'd never have been willing to do it if you'd known they were for publication—I know you. And I saved the drawings. I'm vain of those illustrations. Abbot's weren't in it, next to yours."

As a matter of fact I have a pretty talent for copying plant and insect. I have but little originality, but this very limitation made the drawings more valuable. They were almost painfully exact, the measurements and coloration being as approximately perfect as I could get them.

Now that the book has been included in all standard lists I needn't speak of it at length—the reviewers have given it what measure of bricks and bouquets it deserved. But it is a clever, able, comprehensive book, and that is why it has made its wide appeal.

Every least credit that could possibly be given to me, he had scrupulously rendered. He had made full use of note and drawing. He made light enough of his own great labor of compilation, but his preface was quick to state his "great indebtedness to his patient and wise teacher."

One sees that the situation was not without irony. But I could not cloud his pleasure in my co-authorship nor dim his happiness by disclaiming one jot or tittle of what he had chosen to accredit me with. It is more blessed to give than to receive, but much more difficult to receive than to give.

"Do you like it?" he asked, hopefully.

"I am most horribly proud of it," said I, honestly.

"Sure, parson? Hand on your heart?"

"Sure. Hand on my heart."

"All right, then," said he, sighing with relief.

"Here's your share of the loot," and he pushed a check across the table.

"But—" I hesitated, blinking, for it was a check of sorts.

"But nothing. Blow it in. Say, I'm curious. What are you going to do with yours?"

"What are you going to do with yours?" I asked in return.

He reddened, hesitated; then his head went up.

"I figure it, parson, that by way of that rag-doll I'm kin to Louisa's ma. As near as I can get to it, Louisa's ma's my widow. It's a devil of a responsibility for a live man to have a widow. It worries him. Just to get her off my mind I'm going to invest my share of this book for her. She'll at least be sure of a roof and fire and shoes and clothes and bread with butter on it and staying home sometimes. She'll have to work, of course; anyway you looked at it, it wouldn't be right to take work away from her. She'll work, then; but she won't be worked. Louisa's managed to pull something out of her wishin' curl for her ma, after all. I'm sure I hope they'll let the child know."

I could not speak for a moment; but as I looked at him, the red in his tanned cheek deepened.

"As a matter of fact, parson," he explained, "somebody ought to do something for a woman that looks like that, and it might just as well be me. I'm willing to pay good money to have my widow turn her mouth the other way up, and I hope she'll buy a back-comb for those bangs on her neck."

"And all this," said I, "came out of one little wishin' curl, Butterfly Man?"

"But what else could I do?" he wondered, "when I'm kin to Loujaney by bornation?" and to hide his feeling, he asked again:

"Now what are you going to do with yours?"

I reflected. I watched his clever, quizzical eyes, out of which the diamond-bright hardness had vanished, and into which I am sure that dear child's curl had wished this milder, clearer light.

"You want to know what I am going to do with mine?" said I, airily. "Well; as for me, the very first thing I am going to do is to purchase, in perpetuity, a fine new lamp for St. Stanislaus!"



CHAPTER XV

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

Timid tentative rifts and wedges of blue had ventured back into the cold gray sky, and a stout-hearted robin or two heralded spring. One morning coming from mass I saw in the thin watery sunshine the painted wings of the Red Admiral flash by, and I welcomed him as one welcomes the long-missed face of a friend. I cannot choose but love the Red Admiral. He has always stirred my imagination, for frail as his gay wings are they have nevertheless borne this dauntless small Columbus of butterflies across unknown seas and around uncharted lands, until like his twin-sister the Painted Lady he has all but circled the globe. A few days later a handful of those gold butterflies that resemble nothing so much as new bright dandelions in the young grass, dared the unfriendly days before their time as if to coax the lagging spring to follow.

The sad white streamers disappeared from doors and for a space the little white hearse ceased to go glimmering by. Then at many windows appeared small faces bearing upon them the mark of the valley of the shadow through which they had just passed. Although they were on side streets in the dingy mill district, far removed from our pleasant windows that looked out upon trees and flowers, all Appleboro was watching these wan visages with wiser and kinder eyes.

Perhaps the most potent single factor in the arousing of our civic conscience was a small person who might have justly thought we hadn't any: I mean Loujaney's little ma, whose story had crept out and gone from lip to lip and from home to home, making an appeal to which there could be no refusal.

When Major Cartwright heard it, the high-hearted old rebel hurried over to the Parish House and thrust into my hand a lean roll of bills. And the major is by no means a rich man.

"It's not tainted money," said the major, "though some mighty good Bourbon is goin' to turn into pap on account of it. However, it's an ill wind that doesn't blow somebody good—Marse Robert can come on back upstairs now an' thaw himself out while watchin' me read the Lamentations of Jeremiah—who was evidently sufferin' from a dry spell himself."

On the following Sunday the Baptist minister chose for his text that verse of Matthew which bids us take heed that we despise not one of these little ones because in heaven their angels do always behold the face of our Father. And then he told his people of that little one who had pretended to love dry bread when she couldn't get any butter—in Appleboro. And who had gone to her rest holding to her thin breast a rag-doll that was kin to her by bornation, Loujaney being poor folks herself and knowing prezactly how't was.

Over the heads of loved and sheltered children the Baptist brethren looked at each other. Of course, it wasn't their fault any more than anybody else's.—In a very husky voice their pastor went on to tell them of the curl which the woman who hadn't a God's thing left to wish for had given as a remembrance to "that good and kind man, our brother John Flint, sometimes known as the Butterfly Man."

Dabney put the plain little discourse into print and heightened its effect by an editorial couched in the plainest terms. We were none of us in the humor to hear a spade called an agricultural implement just then, and Dabney knew it; particularly when the mill dividends and the cemetery both showed a marked increase.

Something had to be done, and quickly, but we didn't exactly know how nor where to begin doing it. Laurence, insisting that this was really everybody's business, called a mass-meeting at the schoolhouse, and the Clarion requested every man who didn't intend to bring his women-folks to that meeting to please stay home himself. Wherefore Appleboro town and county came with the wife of its bosom—or maybe the wife came and fetched it along.

Laurence called the meeting to order, and his manner of addressing the feminine portion of his audience would have made his gallant grandfather challenge him. He hadn't a solitary pretty phrase to tickle the ears of the ladies—he spoke of and to them as women.

"And did you see how they fell for him?" rejoiced the Butterfly Man, afterward. "From the kid in a middy up to the great old girl with three chins and a prow like an ocean liner, they were with him. When you're in dead earnest, can the ladies; just go after women as women and they're with you every time. They know."

A Civic Leaguer followed Laurence, then Madame, and after her a girl from the mills, whose two small brothers went in one night. There were no set speeches. Everybody who spoke had something to say; and everybody who had something to say spoke. Then Westmoreland, who like Saul the king was taller by the head and shoulders than all Israel, bulked up big and good and begged us to remember that we couldn't do anything of permanent value until we first learned how to reach those folks we had been ignoring and neglecting. He said gruffly that Appleboro had dumped its whole duty in this respect upon the frail shoulders of one old priest, and that the Guest Rooms were overworked. Didn't the town want to do its share now? The town voted, unanimously, that it did.

There was a pause. Laurence asked if anybody else had anything to say? Apparently, anybody else hadn't.

"Well, then," said Laurence, smiling, "before we adjourn, is there anybody in particular that Appleboro County here assembled wants to hear?"

And at that came a sort of stir, a murmur, as of an immense multitude of bees:

"The Butterfly Man!" And louder: "The Butterfly Man!"

Followed a great hand-clapping, shrill whistles, the stamping of feet. And there he was, with Westmoreland and Laurence behind him as if to keep him from bolting. His face expressed a horrified astonishment. Twice, thrice, he opened his lips, and no words came. Then:

"I?" in a high and agonized falsetto.

"You!" Appleboro County settled back with rustles of satisfaction. "Speech! Speech!" From a corn-club man, joyfully.

"Oh, marmar, look! It's the Butterfly Man, marmar!" squealed a child.

"A-a-h! Talk weeth us, Meester Fleent!" For the first time a "hand" felt that he might speak out openly in Appleboro.

John Flint stood there staring owlishly at all these people who ought to know very well that he hadn't anything to say: what should he have to say? He was embarrassed; he was also most horribly frightened. But then, after all, they weren't anything but people, just folks like himself! When he remembered that his panic subsided. For a moment he reflected; as if satisfied, he nodded slightly and thrust his hand into his breast pocket.

"Instead of having to listen to me you'd better just look at this," said the Butterfly Man. "Because this can talk louder and say more in a minute than I could between now and Judgment." And he held out Louisa's dear fair whimsy of a curl; the sort of curl mothers tuck behind a rosy ear of nights, and fathers lean to and kiss. "I haven't got anything to say," said the Butterfly Man. "The best I can do is just to wish for the children all that Louisa pretended to pull out of her wishin' curl—and never got. I wish on it that all the kids get a square deal—their chance to grow and play and be healthy and happy and make good. And I wish again," said the Butterfly Man, looking at his hearers with his steady eyes, "I wish that you folks, every God-blessed one of you, will help to make that wish come true, so far as lies in your power, from now until you die!" His funny, twisty smile flashed out. He put the fairy tress back into his breast pocket, made a casual gesture to imply that he had concluded his wishes for the present; and walked off in the midst of the deepest silence that had ever fallen upon an Appleboro audience.

But however willing we might be, we discovered that we could not do things as quickly or as well as might be wished. People who wanted to help blundered tactlessly. People who wanted to be helped had to be investigated. People who ought to be helped were suspicious and resentful, couldn't always understand or appreciate this sudden interest in their affairs, were inclined to slam doors, or, when cornered, to lie stolidly, with wooden faces and expressionless eyes.

Ensued an awkward pause, until the Butterfly Man came unobtrusively forward, discovering in himself that amazing diplomacy inherent in the Irish when they attend to anybody's business but their own. It was amusing to watch the only democrat in a solidly Democratic county infusing something of his own unabashed humanness into proceedings which but for him might have sloughed into

Organized charity, carefully iced, In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.

Having done what was to be done, he went about his own affairs. Nobody gushed over him, and he escaped that perilous popularity which is as a millstone around a man's neck. Nevertheless the Butterfly Man had stumbled upon the something divine in his fellows, and they entertained for him a feeling that wasn't any more tangible, say, than pure air, and no more emotional than pure water, but was just about as vital and life-giving.

I was enchanted to have a whole county endorse my private judgment. I rose so in my own estimation that I fancy I was a bit condescending to St. Stanislaus! I was vain of the Butterfly Man's standing—folks couldn't like him too much, to please me. And I was greatly interested in the many invitations that poured in upon him, invitations that ranged all the way from a birthday party at Michael Karski's to a state dinner at the Eustis's.

From Michael's he came home gaily, a most outrageous posy pinned upon him by way of honor, and whistling a Slavic love song so dismal that one inferred love must be something like toothache for painfulness. He had had such a bully time, he told me. Big Jan had been there with his wife, an old friend of Michael's Katya. Although pale, and still somewhat shaky as to legs, Jan had willingly enough shaken hands with his conqueror.

It seemed quite right and natural that he and Jan should presently enter into a sort of Dual Alliance. Meester Fleent was to be Arbitrator Extraordinary. When he stipulated that thereafter Big Jan was only to tackle a man his own size, everybody cheered madly, and Mrs. Jan herself beamed red-eyed approval. She said her prayers to the man who had trounced Jan into righteousness.

But from the Eustis dinner, to which he went with my mother, he came home somber and heavy-hearted. Laurence was conspicuously absent; it is true he was away, defending his first big case in another part of the State. But Mr. George Inglesby was just as conspicuously present, apparently on the best of all possible terms with himself, the world in general, and Mrs. James Eustis in particular. His presence in that house, in the face of persistent rumors, made at least two guests uneasy. Mrs. Eustis showed him a most flattering attention. She was deeply impressed by him. He had just aided her pet mission in China—what he had given the heathen would have buttered my children's bread for many a day. Also, he was all but lyrical in his voicing of the shibboleth that Woman's Sphere is the Home, wherein she should be adored, enshrined, and protected. Woman and the Home! All the innate chivalry of Southern manhood—

I don't know that Louisa's Ma was ever enshrined or protected by the chivalry of any kind of manhood, no, nor any of the mill women. Their kind don't know the word. But Mrs. Eustis was, and she agreed with Mr. Inglesby's noble sentiments.

"Parson, you should have heard him!" raved the Butterfly Man. "There's a sort of man down here that's got chivalry like another sort's got hookworm, and he makes the man that hasn't got either want to set up an image to the great god Dam!

"You'd think being chivalrous would be enough for him, wouldn't you?" continued the Butterfly Man, bitterly. "Nix! What's he been working the heavy charity lay for, except that it's his turn to be a misunderstood Christian? Doesn't charity cover a multitude of skins, though? And doesn't it beat a jimmy when it comes to breaking into society!"

Mary Virginia, he added in an altered voice, had been exquisite in a frock all silver lace and shimmery stuffs like moonbeams, and with a rope of pearls about her throat, and in her black hair. Appleboro folks do not affect orchids, but Mary Virginia wore a huge cluster of those exotics. She had been very gracious to the Butterfly Man and Madame. But only for a brief bright minute had she been the Mary Virginia they knew. All the rest of the evening she seemed to grow statelier, colder, more dazzlingly and imperially regal. And her eyes were like frozen sapphires under her level brows, and her mouth was the red splendid bow of Pride.

Watching her, my mother was pained and puzzled; as for the Butterfly Man, his heart went below zero. Those who loved Mary Virginia had cause for painful reflections.

Blinded by her beauty, were we judging her by the light of affection, instead of the colder light of reason? We couldn't approve of her behavior to Laurence, nor was it easy to refrain from disapproval of what appeared to be a tacit endurance of Inglesby's attention. She couldn't plead ignorance of what was open enough to be town talk—the man's shameless passion for herself, a passion he seemed to take delight in flaunting. And she made no effort to explain; she seemed deliberately to exclude her old friends from the confidence once so freely given. She hadn't visited the Parish House since she had broken her engagement.

And all the while the spring that hadn't time for the little concerns of mortals went secretly about her immortal business of rejuvenation. The blue that had been so timid and so tentative overspread the sky; more robins came, and after them bluebirds and redbirds and Peterbirds, and the impudent screaming robber jay that is so beautiful and so bold, and flute-voiced vireos, and nuthatches, and the darling busybody wren fussing about her house-building in the corners of our piazzas. The first red flowers of the Japanese quince opened flame-like on the bare brown bushes. When the bridal-wreath by the gate saw that, she set industriously to work upon her own wedding-gown. The yellow jessamine was full of waxy gold buds; and long since those bold frontiersmen of the year, the Judas-trees, had flaunted it in bravest scarlet, and the slim-legged scouts of the pines showed shoulder-straps and cockades of new gay green above gallant brown leggings.

One brand new morning the Butterfly Man called me aside and placed in my hands a letter. The American Society of Natural History invited Mr. John Flint, already a member of the Entomological Society of France, a Fellow of the Entomological Society of London, and a member of the greatest of Dutch and German Associations, to speak before it and its guests, at a most notable meeting to be held in the Society's splendid Museum in New York City. Not to mention two mere ex-Presidents, some of the greatest scientific names of the Americas were included in that list. And it was before such as these that my Butterfly Man was to speak. Behold me rocking on my toes!

The first effect of this invitation was to please me immensely, I being a puffed-up old man and carnal-minded at times; nor do I seem to improve with age. The plaudits of the world, for anybody I admire and love, ring most sweetly in my foolish ears. Now the honors he had gotten from abroad were fine and good in their way, but this meant that the value of his work was recognized and his position established in his own country, in his own time. It meant a widening of his horizon, association with clever men and women, ennobling friendships to broaden his life. A just measure of appreciation from the worthwhile sweetens toil and encourages genius. And yet—our eyes met, and mine had to ask an old question.

"Would you better accept it?" I wondered.

"I can't afford not to," said he resolutely. "The time's come for me to get out in the open, and I might just as well face the music, and Do it Now. Risks? I hardly think so. I never hunted in couples, remember—I always went by my lonesome and got away with it. Besides, who's remembering Slippy? Nobody. He's drowned and dead and done with. But, however, and nevertheless, and because, I shall go."

Again we looked at each other; and his look was untroubled.

"The pipe-dreams I've had about slipping back into little old New York! But if anybody had told me I'd go back like I'm going, with the sort of folks waiting for me that will be waiting now, I'd have passed it up. Well, you never can tell, can you? And in a way it's funny—now isn't it?"

"No, you never can tell," said I, soberly. "But I do not think it at all funny. Quite the contrary." Suppose, oh, suppose, that after all these years, when a well-earned success was in his grasp, it should happen—I turned pale. He read my fear in my face and his smile might have been borrowed from my mother's mouth.

"Don't you get cold feet, parson," he counseled kindly. "Be a sport! Besides, it's all in the Game, you know."

"Is it?"

"Sure!"

"And worth while, John?"

He laughed. "Believe me! It's the worthwhilest thing under the sun to sit in the Game, with a sport's interest in the hands dealt out, taking yours as it comes to you, bluffing all you can when you've got to, playing your cards for all they're worth when it's your turn. No reneging. No squealing when you lose. No boasting how you did it when you win. There's nothing in the whole universe so intensely and immensely worth while as being you and alive, with yourself the whole kitty and the sky your limit! It's one great old Game, and I'm for thanking the Big Dealer that I'da whack at playing it." And his eyes snapped and his lean brown face flushed.

"And you are really willing to—to stake yourself now, my son?"

"Lord, parson, you ought to know! And you a dead ringer for the real thing in a classy sport yourself!"

"My dear son—!"

My dear son waved his fine hand, and chuckled in his red beard.

"Would you back down if this was your call? Why, you're the sort that would tackle the biggest noise in the ring, even if you knew you'd be dragged out on your pantry in the first half of the first round, if you thought you'd got holy orders to do it! If you saw me getting jellyfish of the spine now, you'd curl up and die—wouldn't you, honest Injun?" His eyes crinkled and he grinned so infectiously that my fears subsided. I had an almost superstitious certainty that nothing really evil could happen to a man who could grin like that. Fate and fortune are perfectly powerless before the human being who can meet them with the sword of a smile.

"Well," I admitted cautiously, "jellyfish of the spine must be an unlovely ailment; not that I ever heard of it before."

"You're willing for me to go, then?"

"You'd go anyhow, would you not?"

"Forget it!" said he roughly. "If you think I'd do anything I knew would cause you uneasiness, you've got another thing coming to you."

"Oh, go, for heaven's sake!" said I, sharply.

"All right. I'll go for heaven's sake," he agreed cheerfully. "And now it's formally decided I'm to go, and talk, the question arises—what they really want me to talk about? I don't know how to deal in glittering generalities. A chap on the trail of truth has got to let generalities go by the board. The minute he tackles the living Little People he chucks theories and bucks conditions.

"Suppose I tell the truth as I see it: that most so-called authorities are like cats chasing their tails—because they accept theories that have never been really proven, run after them, and so never get anywhere? And that facts dug up in the open under the sunlight don't always fit in with notions hatched out in libraries under the electric light?

"Suppose I say that after they've run everything down to that plasma they're so fond of beginning and ending with, there is still something behind it all their theories can't explain away? Protoplasm doesn't explain Life any more than the battery explains electricity. Instinct? Evolution? The survival of the fittest? Well, nothing is tagged for fair, and I'm more than willing to be shown. For the more I find out from the living things themselves,—you can't get truth from death, you've got to get it from life—the more self-evident it seems to me that to exist at all insects must have arrived on the scene complete, handfinished, with the union label of the Great Workshop on them by way of a trade-mark."

"As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, one God, world without end, Amen!" said I, smiling. I have never thought it necessary to explain or excuse the Creator. God is; things are.

But he shook his head, wrinkling his forehead painfully. "I wish I knew," said he, wistfully. "You're satisfied to believe, but I have got to know. Oh, great Power behind Things, I want to know! I want to know!"

Ah, but I also do most passionately wish to know! If, however, the Insect has taught me anything in my lifelong study of it, it is to recognize the Unknowable, to know there is that which I cannot hope to know. But if under the law of its world, so different from ours and yet so alike because so inevitable, the Insect must move in a fixed circle within which it is safe, a circle whose very limitation preserves it from error and thus from destruction, may not a like fixed circle beyond which we may not penetrate preserve us, too? Are these mountain peaks of the Unknowable, the Impassable, which encompass the skyline of our humanity, these heights so mysterious and so unscalable, not rather bulwarks between man's pride and the abyss?

Something of this I said to the Butterfly Man, and he nodded, but did not answer. He fell into a brown study; then plunged from the room without further look or word and made for his own desk. I was not afraid of what the Butterfly Man, fresh from little Appleboro's woods and fields, would have to say to the scholars and scientists gathered to hear him!

Apparently he was not either, for after he had gotten a few notes together he wisely turned the whole affair over to that mysterious Self that does our work and solves our problems for us. On the surface he busied himself with a paper setting forth the many reasons why the County of Appleboro should appropriate adequate funds for a common dipping vat, and hurried this to Dabney, who was holding open a space in the Clarion for it. Then there were new breeding cages to be made, for the supply of eggs and cocoons on hand would require additional quarters, once they began to emerge.

By the Saturday he had finished all this; and as I had that afternoon free we spent some beautiful hours with the microscope and slide mounts. I completed, too, the long delayed drawings of some diurnal wasp-moths and their larvae. We worked until my mother interrupted us with a summons to an early dinner, for Saturday evening belongs to the confessional and I was shortly due at the church.

I left Flint with Madame and Miss Sally Ruth, who had run over after the neighborly Appleboro wont with a plate of fresh sponge-cake and a bowl of fragrant custard. Miss Sally Ruth is nothing if not generous, but there are times when one could wish upon her the affliction of dumbness. As I slipped into my cassock in the study, I could hear her uplifted voice, a voice so insistent and so penetrating that it can pierce closed doors and come through a ceiling:

"I declare to goodness, I don't know what to believe any more! She's got money enough in her own right, hasn't she? For heaven's sake, then, why should she marry for more money? But you never really know people, do you? Why, folks say—"

I hurried out of the house and ran the short distance to the church. I wished I hadn't heard; I wished Miss Sally Ruth, good as she is, would sometimes hold her tongue. She will set folks by the ears in heaven some of these days if she doesn't mend her ways before she gets there.

It must have been all of ten o'clock when I got back to the Parish House. Madame had retired; John Flint's rooms were dark. The night itself was dark, though in between the clouds that a brisk wind pulleyhauled about the skies, one saw many stars.

Too tired to sleep, I sat beside my window and breathed the repose that lay like a benediction upon the little city. I found myself praying; for Mary Virginia, whom I loved and over whom I was sorely troubled; for Laurence, even now walking such a road as I also once had to travel with feet as young but no more steadfast; and then with a thankfulness too deep for words, I thought a prayer for the Butterfly Man. So thinking and so praying, with a glow in my heart because of him, I closed my window, and crept into bed and into sleep.

I awoke with a start. Somebody was in the room. There was an urgent voice whispering my name, an urgent hand upon me. A pocket light flashed, and in its pale circle appeared the face of John Flint.

"Get up!" said he in an intense whisper. "And come. Come!"

"Why, what in the name of heaven—"

"Don't make a row!" he snarled, and brought his face close. "Here—let me help you. Heaven, man, how slow you are!" With furious haste he forced my clothes upon me and even as I mechanically struggled to adjust them he was hustling me toward the door, through the dark hall, and down the stairs.

"Easy there—careful of that step!" he breathed in my ear, guiding me.

"But what is the matter?" I whispered back impatiently. I do not relish mystery and I detest being led willynilly.

"In my rooms," said he briefly, and hustled me across the garden on the double run, I with my teeth chattering, for I had been dragged out of my sleep, and the night air was cold.

He fairly lifted me up his porch-steps, unlocked his door, and pushed me inside. With the drawn shades and the flickering firelight, the room was peaceful and pleasant enough. Then Kerry caught my astonished gaze, for the dog stood statue-like beside the Morris chair, and when I saw what Kerry guarded I crossed myself. Sunk into the chair, the Butterfly Man's old gray overcoat partly around her, was Mary Virginia.

At my involuntary exclamation she raised her head and regarded me. A great sigh welled from her bosom and I could see her eyes dilate and her lips quiver.

"Padre, Padre!" Down went her head, and she began to cry childishly, with sobs.

I watched her helplessly, too bewildered to speak. But the other man's face was the face of one crucified. I saw his eyes, and something I had been all too blind to rushed upon me overwhelmingly. This, then, was what had driven him forth for a time, this was what had left its indelible imprint upon him! He had hung upon his cross and I had not known. Oh, Butterfly Man, I had not known!

"She'll be able to talk to you in a few minutes now, parson." He was so perfectly unconscious of himself that he had no idea he had just made mute confession. He added, doubtfully: "She said she had to come to you, about something—I don't know what. It's up to you to find out—she's got to talk to you, parson."

"But—I wanted to talk to you, Padre. That's why I—ran away from home in the middle of the night." She sat suddenly erect. "I just couldn't stand things, any more—by myself—"

Gone was the fine lady, the great beauty, the proud jilt who had broken Laurence's heart and maddened and enslaved Inglesby. Here was only a piteous child with eyes heavy from weeping, with a pale and sad face and drooping childish lips. And yet she was so dear and so lovely, for all her reddened eyelids and her reddened little nose, that one could have wept with her. The Butterfly Man, with an intake of breath, stood up.