"I shall leave you with the Padre now," he said evenly, "to tell him what you wanted to tell him. Father, understand: there's something rotten wrong, as I've been telling you all along. Now she's got to tell you what it is and all about it. Everything. Whether she likes to or not, and no matter what it is, she's got to tell you. You understand that, Mary Virginia?"

She fixed him with a glance that had in it something hostile and oblique. Even with those dearest of women whom I adore, there are moments when I have the impression that they have, so to speak, their ears laid back flat, and I experience what I may justly term cat-fear. I felt it then.

"Oh, don't have too much consideration for my feelings, Mr. Flint!" said she, with that oblique and baffling glance, and the smile Old Fitz once likened to the Curve in the Cat's Tail. "Indeed, why should you go? Why don't you stay and find out why I wanted to run to the Padre—to beg him to find some way to help me, since I can't fall like a plum into Mr. Inglesby's hand when Mr. Hunter shakes the Eustis family tree!"

His breath came whistlingly between his teeth.

"Parson! You hear?" he slapped his leg with his open palm. "Oh, I knew it, I knew it!" And he turned upon her a kindling glance:

"I knew all along it was never in you to be anything but true!" said the Butterfly Man.



CHAPTER XVI

"WILL YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR"

It is impossible for me to put down in her own words what Mary Virginia told the Butterfly Man and me. Also, I have had to fill in gaps here and there, supplying what was lacking, from my intimate knowledge of the actors and from such chance words and hints and bits of detail as came to me afterward. But what I have added has been necessary, in order to do greater justice to everybody concerned.

If it be true that the boy is father to the man, it is even more tritely true that the girl is mother to the woman, there being here less chance for change. So it was with Mary Virginia. That gracious little girlhood of hers, lived among the birds and bees and blossoms of an old Carolina garden, had sent her into the Church School with a settled and definite idealism as part of her nature. Her creed was simple enough: The world she knew was the best of all possible worlds, its men good, its women better; and to be happy and loved one had only to be good and loving.

The school did not disabuse her of this pleasing optimism. It was a very expensive school and could afford to have optimisms of its own. For one thing, it had no pupils poor enough to apply the acid test.

When Mary Virginia was seventeen, Mrs. Eustis perceived with dismay that her child who had promised beauty was instead become angular, awkward, and self-conscious; and promptly packed the unworldly one off to spend a saving summer with a strenuously fashionable cousin, a widow, of whom she herself was very fond. She liked the idea of placing the gauche girl under so vigorous and seasoned a wing as Estelle Baker's. As for Mrs. Baker herself, that gay and good-humored lady laughed at the leggy and serious youngster and promptly took her education in hand along lines not laid down in Church Schools.

Mrs. Baker was delighted with her own position—the reasonably young, handsome, and wealthy widow of a man she had been satisfied to marry and later to bury. She had an unimpaired digestion and no illusions, a kind heart, and the power of laughter. Naturally, she found life interesting. A club-woman, an ultra-modernist, vitally alive, she was fully abreast of her day. Her small library skimmed the cream of the insurgents and revolutionaries of genius; and here the shy and reticent schoolgirl with the mark of the churchly checkrein fresh upon her, was free to browse, for her cousin had no slightest notion of playing censor. Mrs. Baker thought that the sooner one was allowed to slough off the gaucheries of the Young Person, the better. She did not gauge the real and tumultuous depths of feeling concealed under the young girl's simplicity.

The revolutionaries and the insurgent and free poets didn't trouble Mary Virginia very much. Although she sensed that something was wrong with somebody somewhere—hence these lyrical lamentations—she could not, to save her, tell what all the pother was about, for as yet she saw the world couleur de rose. Some one or two of the French and Germans pleased her; she fell into long reveries over the Gael, who has the sound of the sea in his voice and whose eyes are full of a haunting light, as of sunsets upon graves. But it was the Russians who electrified and dazzled her. When she glimpsed with her eyes of a young girl those strange souls simple as children's and yet mosaiced with unimaginable and barbarous splendors, she stood blinking and half blinded, awed, fascinated, and avid to know more of that sky-scaling passion with which they burned.

And in that crucial moment she chanced upon the "Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff," so frank and so astounding that it took her breath away and swept her off her feet. She was stirred into a vague and trembling expectancy; she had the sense of waiting for something to happen. Life instantly became more colorful and more wonderful than she had dreamed could be possible, and she wished passionately to experience all these emotions, so powerful and so poignant. The Russian's morbid and disease-bright genius acted upon her as with the force and intensity of a new and potent toxin. She could not lay the book aside, but carried it up to her room to be pored and pondered over. She failed to understand that, untried as she was, it was impossible for her to understand it. Had the book come later, it had been harmless enough; but it came at a most critical moment of that seething period when youth turns inward to question the universe, and demands that the answer shall be personal to itself. The first long ground-swell of awakening emotion swept over her, sitting in the pleasant chintz-hung room, with the Russian woman's wild and tameless heart beating through the book open upon her knees. And these waves of emotion that at recurrent intervals surge over the soul, come from the shores of a farther country than any earthly seas have touched, and recede to depths so profound that only the eyes of God may follow their ebb and flow.

Mrs. Baker, however, saw nothing about which to give herself any concern. If she perceived the girl intense and preoccupied, she smiled indulgently—at Mary Virginia's age one is apt to be like that, and one recovers from that phase as one gets over mumps and measles. Mrs. Baker did think it advisable, though, to subtly detach the girl from books for awhile. She amused herself by allowing her wide-eyed glimpses of the larger life of grown-ups, by way of arousing and initiation. Thus it happened that one afternoon at the country-club, where Mary Virginia, at the green-fruit stage, found herself playing gooseberry instead of golf, Mrs. Baker sauntered up with a tall and very blonde man.

"Here," said she gaily, indicating with a wave of her hand her sulky-eyed young cousin, "is a marvel and a wonder—a girl who accepts on faith everything and everybody! My dear Howard, in all probability she will presently even believe in you!" With that she left them, whisked off by a waiting golfer.

The man and the girl appraised each other. The man saw young bread-and-butter with the raw sugar of beauty sprinkled upon it promisingly. What the girl saw was not so much a faultlessly groomed and handsome man as the most beautiful person in the world. And suddenly she was aware that that for which she had been waiting had come. Something divine and wonderful was happening, and there was fire before her eyes and the noise of unloosed winds and great waters in her ears, and her knees trembled and her heart fluttered. A vivid red flamed into her pale cheeks, a soft and trembling light suffused her blue eyes. That happens when the sweet and virginal freshness of youth is brought face to face with the bright shadow of love.

He drew her out of her shyness and made her laugh, and after awhile, when there was dancing, he danced with her. He did not behave to her as other men of Estelle's acquaintance had more than once behaved—as though they bestowed the lordly honor of their society upon her out of the sheer goodness of their hearts and their desire to please Mrs. Baker. Mary Virginia was uncompromising and stiff-necked enough then, and she bored most of her cousin's friends unconsciously. Now this man, as much their superior as the sun is to farthing dips, was exerting himself to please her. That was the one thing Mary Virginia needed to arouse her.

Mrs. Baker admired Mr. Hunter for a grace of manner almost Latin in its charm. If at times he puzzled her, he at least never bored her or anybody else, and for this she praised him in the gates. Her respect for him deepened when she perceived that he never allowed himself to be absorbed or monopolized.

The pleasant widow did not take him too seriously. She only asked that he amuse and interest her. He did both, to a superlative degree. That is why and how he saw so much of the school-girl cousin whose naivete made him smile, it was so absurdly sincere.

Mrs. Baker was glad enough to have Howard take her charge off her hands occasionally. She thought contact with this fine pagan an excellent thing for the girl who took herself so seriously. She was really fond of Mary Virginia, but she must have found her hand-grenade directness a bit disconcerting at times. She wanted the child's visit to be pleasant, and she considered it very amiable of Howard to help her make it so. She had no faintest notion of danger—to her Mary Virginia was nothing but a child, a little girl one indulged with pickles and pound-cake and the bliss of staying up later than the usual bedtime. As for Hunter, his was the French attitude toward the Young Person; she had heard him say he preferred his flowers in full bloom and his fruit ripe—one then knows what one is getting; one isn't deceived by canker in the closed bud and worm in the green fruit. No, Howard wasn't the sort that hankered for verjuice.

None the less, although Mrs. Baker didn't know it, Mary Virginia was engaged to the godlike Howard when she returned to school. It was to be a state secret until after she was graduated, and in the meantime he was to "make himself worthier of her love." She hadn't any notion he could be improved upon, but it pleased her to hear him say that. Humility in the superman is the ultimate proof of perfection.

The maid who attended her room at school arranged for the receipt of his letters and mailed Mary Virginia's. The maid was sentimental, and delighted to play a part smacking of those dime novels she spoiled her brains with.

The little schoolgirl who was in love with love, and secretly betrothed to a man who had stepped alive out of old knightly romance, walked in the Land of April Rainbows and felt the whole joyous universe suffused with a delicious and quivering glow of light and sound and scent. Surcharged with an emotion that she was irresistibly urged to express, and unable to do so by word of mouth, she was driven to the necessity of putting it down on paper for him. And she put it down in the burning words, the fiery phrases, of those anarchists of art who had intoxicated and obsessed her.

Just a little later,—even a year later—and Mary Virginia could never have written those letters. But now, very ignorant, very innocent, very impassioned, she accomplished a miracle. She was like one speaking an unknown tongue, perfectly sure that the spirit moved her, but quite unable to comprehend what it was that it moved her to say.

When Mrs. Baker insisted that her young cousin should come back to her for the Christmas holidays, the girl was more than eager to go. Seeing him again only deepened her infatuation.

That holiday visit was an unusually gay one, for Mrs. Baker was really fond of Mary Virginia—the young girl's tenderness and simplicity touched the woman of the world. She gave a farewell dance the night before Mary Virginia was to return to school. It was an informal affair, with enough college boys and girls to lend it a junior air, but there was a goodly sprinkling of grown-ups to deepen it, for the hostess said frankly that she simply couldn't stand the Very Young except in broken doses and in bright spots.

Hunter, of course, was to be one of the grownups. He had sent Mary Virginia the flowers she was to wear. And she had a new dancing frock, quite the loveliest and fluffiest and laciest she had ever worn.

He was somewhat late. And so engrossed with him were all her thoughts, so eager was she to see him, that she was a disappointing companion for anybody else. She couldn't talk to anybody else. She flitted in and out of laughing groups like a blue-and-silver butterfly, and finally managed to slip away to the stair nook behind what Mrs. Baker liked to call the conservatory. This was merely a portion of the big back hall glassed in and hung with a yellow silk curtain; it had a tiny round crystal fountain in the center and one or two carved seats, but one wouldn't think so small a space could hold so much bloom and fragrance. From the nook where Mary Virginia sat, one could hear every word spoken in the flower-room, though the hearer remained hidden by the paneled stairway.

Hands in her lacy lap, eyes abstracted, she fell into the dreams that youth dreams; in which a girl—one's self, say,—walks hand in hand through an enchanted world with a being very, very little lower than the angels and twice as dear. They are such innocent dreams, such impossible dreams, so untouched of all reality; but I wonder, oh I wonder, if life can ever give us anything to repay their loss!

Somebody spoke in the conservatory and she looked up, startled. Through a parting in the silk curtain she glimpsed the woman and recognized one of Estelle's friends, handsome and fashionable, but a woman she had never liked.

"You provoke me. You try my patience too much!" she was saying, in a tone of suppressed anger. "People are beginning to say that you have a serious affair with that sugar-candy chit. I want to know if that is true?"

The man laughed, a lazy, pleasant, disarming laugh. She knew that laugh among a million, and her heart began to beat, but not with doubt or distrust. She wondered how she had missed him, and if he had been looking for her; she thought of the exquisite secret that bound them together, and wondered how he was going to protect it without evasions or untruthfulness. And she thought the woman abominable.

"You're so suspicious, Evie!" he said smilingly. "Why bother about what can give you no real concern? Why discuss it here, at all? It's not the thing, really."

The woman stamped her foot. She had an able-bodied temper.

"I will know, and I will know now. I have to know," said she, and her voice shook. Mary Virginia would have coughed then, would have made her presence known had she been able; but something held her silent. "Remember, you're not dealing with a love-sick school-girl now, Howard: you are dealing with me. Have you made that little fool think you're in love with her?"

"Why, and what then?" he asked coolly. "I like the child. Of course she is without form and void as yet, but there's quite a lot to that girl."

"Oh, yes! Quite a lot!" said she, with sarcasm. "That's what made me take notice. James Eustis's girl—and barrels of money. She'll be a catch. You are clever, Howard! But what of me?"

Mary Virginia's heart fluttered. Indeed, what of this other woman?

"Oh, well, there's nothing definite yet, Evie," said he soothingly. A hint of impatience was betrayed in his voice. Plainly, it irked him to be held up and questioned point-blank, at such a time and place. Just as plainly, he wished to conciliate his jealous questioner. "My dear girl, it would be all of two or three years before the affair could be considered. Let well enough alone, Evie. Let's talk about something else."

"No. We will talk about this. You are offering me a two or three years' reprieve, are you not? Well, and then?"

"Well, and then suppose I do marry the little thing,—if she hasn't changed her little mind?" said he, exasperated into punishing her. "It wouldn't be a bad thing for me, remember, and she's temptingly easy to deal with—that girl has more faith than the twelve apostles. Heavens, Evie, don't look like that! My dearest girl, you don't have to worry, anyhow. If your—er—impediment hasn't stood in my way, why should mine in yours?"

He spoke with a half-impatient, half-playful reproach. The woman uttered a little cry. To soothe and silence her, he kissed her. It was very risky, of course, but then the whole situation was risky, and he took his chance like the bold player he was. The girl crouching behind the paneled wall clenched her hands in her lap, felt her heart and brain on fire, and wondered why the sky did not fall upon the world and blot it out.

When those two had left the conservatory and she could command her trembling limbs and whip her senses back into some semblance of order, she went upstairs and got his letters. When she came downstairs again he was standing in the hall, and he came forward eager, smiling, tender, as if his heart welcomed her; as perhaps it did, men having catholic hearts. She put her hand on his arm and whispered: "Come into the conservatory."

The hall was quite empty. From drawing-room and library and dining-room came the laughter and chatter of many people. Then the music struck up a gay and popular air. The lilt and swing of it made her giddy. But the little flower-room was cool and sweet, and she drew a breath of relief.

Hunter bent his fair head, but she pushed him away with her hands against his chest. A horror of his beauty, his deliberate fascination, the falseness of him, came over her. For the first time she had been brought face to face with sin and falsehood, and hers was the unpardoning white condemnation of an angel to whom sin is unknown and falsehood impossible. That such knowledge should have come through him of all men made the thing more unbearable. Surprised and irritated by the pale tragedy of her aspect, Hunter stared, waiting for her to speak.

"I was on the stairs. I heard you—and that woman," said she with the directness that was sometimes so appalling. "And I know." Her face turned burning red before it paled again. She was ashamed for him with the noble shame of the pure in heart.

His face, too, went red and white with rage and astonishment. It was a damnable trap for a man to be caught in, and he was furious with the two women who had pushed him into it—he could have beaten them both with rods. Innocent as this girl was, he could not hope to deceive her as to the real truth. She had heard too much. But he thought he could manage her; women were as wax in Hunter's hands. To begin with, they wanted to believe him.

"I hate to have to say it—but the lady is jealous," he said frankly enough, with a disarming smile; and shrugged his shoulders, quite as if that simple statement explained and excused everything.

"Oh, she need not be afraid—of me!" said the girl, with white-hot scorn. "I'd rather die by inches of leprosy than belong to you now. You are clever, though. And I was easy to deal with, wasn't I? And I cared so much! I dare say it was really your hair and beard, but I honestly thought you a sort of Archangel! Well, you're not. You're not anything I thought you—not good nor kind nor honorable nor truthful—not anything but just a rather paltry sort of liar. You're not even loyal to her. I think I could respect you more if you were. But I am James Eustis's girl—and that's my salvation, Mr. Hunter. Please take your letters. You will send me back mine to-morrow."

He stroked his short gold beard. The color had come back into his face and a new light flashed into his cold blue eyes. He laughed. "Why, you game little angel!" he said delightedly. "Gad, I never thought you had it in you—never. I begin to adore you, Mary Virginia, upon my soul I do! Now listen to reason, my too-good child, and don't be so puritanical. You've got to take folks as they are and not as you'd like them to be, you know. Men are not angels, no, nor women, either. You must learn to be charitable—a virtue very good people seldom practice and never properly appreciate." And he added, leaning lower: "Mary Virginia! Give me another chance ... you won't be sorry, Ladybird."

But she stood unmoved, stonily silent, holding out the letters. And when he still ignored this silent insistence, she thrust them into his hands and left him.

Mary Virginia was to go back to school the next night. All day she waited for her letters. Instead came a note and a huge bunch of violets. The note said he couldn't allow those precious letters which meant so much to him to pass even into her hands who had written them. When he could summon up the courage, he would presently destroy them himself. And she had treated him with great harshness, and wouldn't she be a good little girl and let him see her, if only for a few minutes, before she went away?

Mary Virginia tore up the note and returned the violets by way of answer.

When she returned to school, the superioress regretted that she had been allowed to visit Mrs. Baker again, because too much gaiety wasn't good for her, and she was falling off in her studies. The other girls said she had lost all her looks, for in truth she was wan and peaked and hollow-eyed. Seventeen suffers frightfully, when it suffers at all. Eighteen enjoys its blighted affection, revels in its broken heart, would like to crochet a black edging on its immortal soul, and wouldn't exchange its secret sorrow for a public joy. Nineteen is convalescent—pride would come to its rescue even if life itself did not beguile it into being happy.

Mary Virginia got back her color and her appetite and forgot to remember that her heart was incurably broken and that she could never love again. She liked to think her painful experience had made her very wise. Then she went abroad, and her cure was complete. The result of it all was that poise and pride which had so greatly delighted the autocratic old kinswoman whose fiat had set the last seal of social success upon her.

When one of life's little jokes flung Hunter into Appleboro and she had to observe him with impartial and less ingenuous eyes, she forgave the simple schoolgirl's natural mistake. He had not changed, and she perceived his effect upon others older and wiser than herself. And her pride chose neither to slight nor to ignore him now, but rather to meet him casually, with indifference, as a stranger in whom she was not at all interested.

Mr. Inglesby she did not take seriously. She did not dream that a possible menace to herself lay in this stout man whom she considered fatuous and absurd, when she thought of him at all. That her mother should be completely taken in by his specious charity and his plausible presentment of himself, did not surprise her. She was inclined to smile scornfully and so dismiss him.

She underestimated Inglesby.

The very fact that there was such an obstacle in the way as a young fellow with whom she fancied herself in love only deepened Inglesby's passion for Mary Virginia. She was in her proper person all that he coveted and groveled to. To possess her in addition to his own wealth—what more could a man ask? Let Eustis become senator, governor, president, anything he chose. But let Inglesby have Mary Virginia by way of fair exchange.

Mr. Inglesby was well aware that Miss Eustis would not for one moment consider him—unless she had to. He proposed to so arrange affairs that she had to. Naturally, he looked to his private secretary to help him bring about this desirable end. And at this opportune moment fate played into his hands in a manner that left Mr. Hunter's assent a matter of course.

Mr. Hunter had very expensive tastes which his salary was not always sufficient to cover. Wherefore, like many another, he speculated. When he was lucky, it was easy money; but it was never enough. Of late he had not been fortunate, and he found himself confronted by the high cost of living as he chose to live. This annoyed him. So when there came his way what appeared to be an absolute certainty of not only recouping all his losses but of making some real money as well, Hunter plunged, with every dollar he could manage to get hold of. But Wall Street is a lane that has many crooked and devious turnings, and Mr. Hunter's investments took a very wrong turn. And this time it was not only all his own money that had been lost. The bottom might have dropped out of things then, except for Inglesby.

When Hunter had to tell him the truth the financier listened with an unmoved face. Then he swung around in his chair, lifted an eyebrow, grunted, and remarked briefly: "Very unsafe thing to do, Hunter. Very." And shoved his personal check across the desk. Nobody knew anything about it, except the head bookkeeper of the bank.

Inglesby had no illusions, however. He understood that to have in his power an immensely clever man who knew as much about his private affairs as Hunter did, was good business, to say the least. He simply invested in Mr. Hunter's brains and personality for his own immediate ends, and he expected his brilliant and expensive secretary to prove the worth of the investment.

Inglesby had not risen to his present heights by beating about the bush in his dealings with others. He had seized Success by the windpipe and throttled it into obedience, and he ruthlessly bent everything and everybody to his own purposes. The task he set before Hunter now was to steer the Inglesby ship through a perilous passage into the matrimonial harbor he had in mind. Let Hunter do that—no matter how—and the pilot's future was assured. Inglesby would be no niggardly rewarder. But let the venture come to shipwreck and Hunter must go down with it. Hunter was not left in any doubt upon that score.

Brought face to face with the situation as it affected his fortune and misfortune, Hunter must have had a very bad half an hour. I am sure he had not dreamed of such a contretemps, and he must have been startled and amazed by the cold calculation and the raw fury of passion he had to deal with. I do not think he relished his task. His was the sort of conscience that would dislike such a course, not because it was dishonorable or immoral in itself, but because its details offended his fastidiousness. I think he would have extricated himself honorably if he could. It just happened that he couldn't.

Give a sufficient shock to a man's pocket-nerve and you electrify his brain-cells, which automatically receive orders to work overtime. Hunter's brain worked then because it had to, self-preservation being the first law of nature. And this service for Inglesby not only spelt safety; it meant the golden key to the heights, the power to gratify those fine tastes which only a rich and able man can afford. Inglesby had promised that, and he had just had a fair example of what Inglesby's support meant.

One must try to consider the case from Mr. Hunter's point of view. To refuse Inglesby meant disaster. And who was Laurence, who was Mary Virginia, that he should quixotically wreck his prospects for them? Why should he lose Inglesby's goodwill or gain Inglesby's enmity for them or anybody else? Forced to choose, Hunter made the only choice possible to him.

Voe victis!



CHAPTER XVII

"—SAID THE SPIDER TO THE FLY—"

Now I am only an old priest and no businessman, so of course I do not know just how Hunter was set like a hound upon the track of those circumstances that, properly manipulated, helped him toward a solution of his problem—the getting of a girl apparently as unreachable as Mary Virginia Eustis.

To start with, he had two assets, the first being Eustis pride. Shrewdly working upon that, Hunter played with skill and finesse.

When he was ready, it was easy enough to meet Miss Eustis on the street of an afternoon. Although her greeting was disconcertingly cold, he fell into step beside her. And presently, in a low and intimate voice, he began to quote certain phrases that rang in her astonished ears with a sort of hateful familiarity.

A glance at her face made him smile. "I wonder," he questioned, "if you have changed, dear puritan? You are engaged to Mayne now, I hear. Very clever chap, Mayne. The moving power behind your father, I understand. And engaged to you! You're so intense and interesting when you're in love that one is tempted to envy Mayne. Do you write him letters, too?"

Mary Virginia's level eyes regarded him with haughty surprise. The situation was rather unbelievable.

"Miss Eustis—" he paused to bow and smile to some passing girls who plainly envied Mary Virginia, "Miss Eustis, you must come to my office, say to-morrow afternoon. We must have a heart-to-heart talk. I have something you will find it to your interest to discuss with me."

She disdained to reply, to ask him to leave her; her attitude did not even suggest that he should explain himself. Seeming to be perfectly content with this attitude, he sauntered along beside her.

"Do you know," he smiled, "that with you the art of writing genuine love-letters amounts to a gift? I am sure your father—and let's say Mayne—would be astonished and delighted to read the ones I have. They are unequaled. Human documents, heart-interest, delicate and piquant sex-tang—the very sort of thing the dear public devours. I told you once they meant a great deal to me, remember? They're going to mean more. Come about four, please." He lifted his hat, bowed, and was gone.

Mary Virginia went to his office at four o'clock the next afternoon, as he had planned she should. She wanted to know exactly what he meant, and she fancied he meant to make her buy back the letters he claimed not to have destroyed. The bare idea of anybody on earth reading those insane vaporings sickened her.

Hunter's manner subtly allowed her to understand that he had known she would come, and this angered her inexpressibly; it gave him an advantage.

"Instead of wasting time in idle persiflage," he said when he had handed her a chair, "let's get right down to brass tacks. You naturally desire to know why I kept your letters? For one reason, because they are a bit of real literature. However, I propose to return them now—for a consideration."

He leaned forward, idly drumming on the polished desk, and regarded her with a sort of impersonal speculation. A little smile crept to his lip.

"The whirligig of time does bring in its revenges, doesn't it?" he mused aloud. Mary Virginia's lips curled.

"I do not follow you," she said coldly. "I am not even sure you have the letters—that is why I am here. I must see them with my own eyes before I agree to pay for them. That is what you expect me to do, is it not?"

"Oh, I have them all right—that is very easily proven," said he, unruffled. "Now listen carefully, please, while I explain the real reason for your presence here this afternoon. Mr. Inglesby, for reasons of his own, desires to don the senatorial toga; why not? Also, even more vehemently, Mr. Inglesby desires to lead to the altar Miss Mary Virginia Eustis: yourself, dear lady, your charming self: again, why not? Who can blame him for so natural and laudable an ambition?

"As to his ever persuading you to become Mrs. Inglesby, without some—ah—moral suasion, why, you know what his chance would be better than I do. As to his persuading the state to send him to Washington, it would have been a certainty, a sure thing, if our zealous young friend Mayne hadn't egged your father into the game. How Mayne managed that, heaven knows, particularly with your father's affairs in the condition they are. Now, Eustis is a fine man. Far too fine to be lost in the shuffle at Washington, where he'd be a condemned nuisance—just as he sometimes is here at home. Do you begin to comprehend?"

"Why, no," said she, blankly. "And I certainly fail to see where my silly letters—"

"Let me make it plainer. You and your silly letters put the game into Mr. Inglesby's hands, swing the balance in his favor. You pay me? Heavens, no! We pay you—and a thumping price at that!"

For a long moment they looked at each other.

"My dear Miss Eustis," he put the tips of his fine fingers together, bent forward over them, and favored her with a white-toothed smile, "behold in me Mr. Inglesby's ambassador—the advocate of Cupid. Plainly, I am authorized to offer you Mr. Inglesby's heart, his hand, and—his check-book. Let us suppose you agree to accept—no, don't interrupt me yet, please. And keep your seat, Miss Eustis. You may smile, but I would advise you to consider very seriously what I am about to say to you, and to realize once for all that Mr. Inglesby is in dead earnest and prepared to go to considerable lengths. Well, then, as I was about to say: suppose you agree to accept his proposal! Being above all things a business man, Mr. Inglesby realizes that gilt-edged collateral should be put up for what you have to offer—youth, beauty, charm, health, culture, family name, desirable and influential connections, social position of the highest. In exchange he offers the Inglesby millions, his absolute devotion to yourself, and his hearty support to all your father's plans and interests. Observe the last, please; it is highly important. Besides this, Mayne and Eustis want reform, progress, Demos-with-a-full-dinner-pail, all the wearisome rest of that uplift stuff? Inglesby will see that they get an undiluted dose of it. More yet: if you have any scruples about Mayne, Inglesby will get behind that young man and boost him until he can crow on the weathervane—when you are Mrs. Inglesby. A chap like Mayne would be valuable, properly expurgated. Come, Miss Eustis, that's fair enough. If you refuse—well, it's up to you to make Eustis understand that he must eliminate himself from politics—and look out for himself," he finished ominously.

Mary Virginia rose impetuously.

"I am no longer seventeen, Mr. Hunter. What, do you honestly think you can frighten a grown woman into believing that a handful of silly letters could possibly be worth all that? Well, you can't. And—let me remind you that blackmailing women isn't smiled upon in Carolina. A hint of this and you'd be ostracized."

"So would you. And why use such an extreme term as blackmailing for what really is a very fair offer?" said he, equably. "The letters are not the only arrows in my quiver, Miss Eustis. But as you are more interested in them than anything else just now, suppose we run over a few, just to remind you of their amazing nature?" He rose leisurely, opened the safe in a corner of the room, took from the steel money-vault a package, and Mary Virginia recognized her own writing. Always keeping them under his own hand, he yet allowed her to lean forward and verify what he chose to read.

Her face burned and tears of mortification stung her eyes. Good heavens, had she been as silly and as sentimental as all that? But as she listened to his smooth remorseless voice, mortification merged into amazement and amazement into consternation. Older and wiser now, she saw what ignorance and infatuation had really accomplished, and she realized that a fool can unwittingly pull the universe about her ears.

She was appalled. It was as if her waking self were confronted by an incredible something her dreaming self had done. She knew enough of the world now to realize how such letters would be received—with smiles intended to wound, with the raised eyebrow, the shrugged shoulder. She wondered, with a chill of panic, how she could ever hope to make anybody understand what she admitted she herself couldn't explain. For heaven's sake, what had she been trying to tell this man? She didn't know any more, except that it hadn't been what these letters seemed to reveal.

"Well?" said the lazy, pleasant voice, "don't you agree with me that it would have been barbarous to destroy them? Wonderful, aren't they? Who would credit a demure American schoolgirl with their supreme art? A French court lady might have written them, in a day when folks made a fine art of love and weren't afraid nor ashamed."

"I must have been stark mad!" said she, twisting her fingers. "How could I ever have done it? Oh, how?"

"Oh, we all have our moments of genius!" said he, airily.

As he faced her, smiling and urbane, she noted woman-fashion the superfine quality of his linen, the perfection of every detail of his appearance, the grace with which he wore his clothes. His manner was gracious, even courtly. Yet there was about him something so relentless that for the first time she felt a quiver of fear.

"If my father—or Mr. Mayne—knew this, you would undoubtedly be shot!" said she, and her eyes flashed.

"Unwritten law, chivalry, all the rest of that rot? I am well aware that the Southern trigger-finger is none too steady, where lovely woman is concerned," he admitted, with a faint sneer. "But when one plays for high stakes, Miss Eustis, one runs the risks. Granted I do get shot? That wouldn't give you the letters: it would simply hand them over to prosecuting attorneys and the public press, and they'd be damning with blood upon them. No, I don't think there'll be any fireworks—just a sensible deal, in which everybody benefits and nobody loses."

"The thing is impossible, perfectly impossible."

"I don't see why. Everything has its price and I'm offering you a pretty stiff one."

"I would rather be burned alive. Marry Mr. Inglesby? I? Why, he is impossible, perfectly impossible!"

"He is nothing of the kind. And he is very much in love with you—you amount to a grand passion with Inglesby. Also, he has twenty millions." He added dryly: "You are hard to please."

Mary Virginia waved aside grand passion and twenty millions with a gesture of ineffable disdain.

"Even if I were weak and silly enough to take you seriously, do you imagine my father would ever consent? He would despise me. He would rather see me dead."

"Oh, no, he wouldn't. Nobody can afford to despise a woman with twenty millions. It isn't in human nature. Particularly when you save Mr. James Eustis himself from coming a breakneck cropper, to say the very least."

For the moment she missed the significance of that last remark.

"I repeat that I would rather be burned alive. I despise the man!" said she, passionately.

"Oh, no, you wouldn't." His manner was a bit contemptuous. "And you'd soon get used to him. Women and cats are like that. They may squall and scratch a bit at first, but the saucer of cream reconciles them, and presently they are quite at home and purring, the sensible creatures! You'll end by liking him very well."

The girl ignored this Job's comforting.

"What shall I say to my father?" she asked directly. "Tell him you kept the foolish letters written you by an ignorant child—and the price is either his or my selling out to Mr. Inglesby?"

"That is your lookout. You can't expect us to let your side whip us, hands down, can you? Mr. Inglesby does not propose to submit tamely to everything." His face hardened, a glacial glint snapped into his eyes. "Inglesby's no worse than anybody else would be that had to hold down his job. He's got virtues, plenty of solid good-citizen, church-member, father-of-a-family virtues, little as you seem to realize it. Also, let me repeat—he has twenty millions. To buy up a handful of letters for twenty million dollars looks to me about the biggest price ever paid since the world began. Don't be a fool!"

"I refuse. I refuse absolutely and unconditionally. I shall immediately send for my father—and for Mr. Mayne—"

"I give you credit for better sense," said he, with a razor-edged smile. "Eustis is honorable and Mayne is in love with you, and when you spring this they'll swear they believe you: but will they? Do men ever believe women, without the leaven of a little doubt? Speaking as a man for men, I wouldn't put them to the test. No, dear lady, I hardly think you are going to be so silly. Now let us pass on to something of greater moment than the letters. Did you think I had nothing else to urge upon you?"

"What, more?" said she, derisively. "I don't think I understand."

"I am sure you don't. Permit me, then, to enlighten you." He paused a moment, as if to reflect. Then, impressively:

"Hitherto, Miss Eustis, you have had the very button on Fortune's cap," he told her. "Suppose, however, that fickle goddess chose to whisk herself off bodily, and left you—you, mind you! to face the ugly realities of poverty, and poverty under a cloud?" And while she stared at him blankly, he asked: "What do you know of your father's affairs?"

As a matter of fact she knew very little. But something in the deadly pleasantness of his voice, something in his eyes, startled her.

"What do you mean, Mr. Hunter?"

"Ah, now we get down to bedrock: your father's affairs," he said evenly. "Your father, Miss Eustis, is a very remarkable man, a man with one idea. In other words, a fanatic. Only a fanatic could accomplish what Eustis has accomplished. His one idea is the very sound old idea that people should remain on the land. He starts in to show his people how to do it successfully. Once started, the work grows like Jonah's gourd. He becomes a sort of rural white hope. So far, so good. But reclamation work, experimenting, blooded stock, up-to-the-minute machinery, labor-saving devices, chemicals, high-priced experts, labor itself, all that calls for money, plenty of money. Your father's work grew to its monumental proportions because he'd gotten other men interested in it—all sorts and conditions of men, but chiefly—and here's at once his strength and weakness—farmers, planters, small-town merchants and bankers. They backed him with everything they had—and they haven't lost—yet.

"However, there are such things as bad seasons, labor troubles, boll-weevil, canker, floods, war. He lost ship-loads of cotton. He lost heavily on rice. Remember those last floods? In some of his places they wiped the work of years clean off the map. He had to begin all over, and he had to do it on borrowed money; which in lean and losing years is expensive. Floods may come and crops may go, but interest on borrowed money goes on forever. He mortgaged all he could mortgage, risked everything he could risk, took every chance—and now everything is at stake with him.

"Do you realize what it would mean if Eustis went under? A smash to shake the state! Consider, too, the effect of failure upon the man himself! He can't fail, though—if Mr. Inglesby chooses to lend a hand. Now do you begin to comprehend?"

In spite of her distrust, he impressed her profoundly. He did not over-estimate her father's passionate belief in himself and the value of his work. If anything, Hunter had slurred the immense influence Eustis exerted, and the calamitous effect his failure would have upon the plain people who looked up to him with such unlimited trust. They would not only lose their money; they would lose something no money could pay for—their faith.

"Oh, but that just simply couldn't happen!" said Mary Virginia, and her chin went up.

"It could very easily happen. It may happen shortly," he contradicted politely. "Heavens, girl, don't you know that the Eustis house is mortgaged to the roof, that Rosemount Plantation is mortgaged from the front fences to the back ditches? No, I suppose he wouldn't want his women-folks to know. He thinks he can tide it over. They always believe they can tide it over, those one-idea chaps. And he could, too, for he's a born winner, is Eustis. Give him time and a good season and he'd be up again, stronger than ever." While he spoke he was taking from a drawer a handful of papers, which he spread out on the desk. She could see upon all of them a bold clear "James Eustis."

"One place mortgaged to prop up another, and that in turn mortgaged to save a third. Like links in a chain. Any chain is only as strong as its weakest link, remember. And we've got the links. Look at these, please." He laid before her two or three slips of paper. Mary Virginia's eyes asked for enlightenment.

"These," explained Hunter, "are promissory notes. You will see that some of them are about due—and the amounts are considerable."

"Oh! And he had to do that?"

"Of course. What else could he do? We kept a very close watch since we got the first inkling that things were not breaking right for him. Mr. Inglesby's own interests are pretty extensive—and we set them to work. It wasn't hard to manage, after things began to shape: a word here, a hint there, an order somewhere else; and once or twice, of course, a bit of pressure was brought to bear, in obdurate instances. But the man with money is always the man with the whip hand. Eustis got the help he had to have—and presently we got these. All perfectly legitimate, all in the course of the day's work.

"Now, promissory notes are dangerous instruments should a holder desire to use them dangerously. Mr. Inglesby could give Eustis an extension of time, or he could demand full payment and immediately foreclose. You see, it's entirely optional with Mr. Inglesby." And he leaned back in his chair, perfectly self-possessed, entirely at his ease, and waited for her to speak.

"You could do that—anybody could do that—to my father?" she was only half-convinced.

"I assure you we can send him under—with a lot of other men's money tied around his neck to keep him down."

"But even you would hesitate to do a thing like that!"

"All is fair," said Hunter, "in love and war."

"Fair?"

"Legitimate, then."

"But if he is in Mr. Inglesby's way and in his power at the same time, why not remove him in the ordinary course of business? Why drag in me and my letters?"

"Why? Because it's the letters that enable us to reach you. My dear girl, Mr. Inglesby doesn't really give a hang whether Eustis sinks or swims. He'd as lief back him as not, for in the long run it's good business to back a winner. But it's you he's playing for, and on that count all is fish that comes to his net. Now do you begin to see?"

Mary Virginia began to see. She looked at the unruffled man before her a bit wonderingly.

"And what do you get out of this?" she asked, unexpectedly. "Mr. Inglesby is to get me, I am to get his money and a package of letters, my father is to get time to save himself; well then, what do you get? The pleasure of doing something wrong? Revenge?"

But Hunter looked at her with cold astonishment. "You surprise me," he said. "You talk as if you'd been going to see too many of those insufferable screen-plays that make the proletariat sniffle and the intelligent swear. I am merely a business man, Miss Eustis, and attending to this particular affair for my employer is all in the course of the day's work. I—er—am not in a position to refuse to obey orders or to be captious, particularly since Mr. Inglesby has agreed to double my present salary. That in itself is no light inducement—but I get more. I get Mr. Inglesby's personal backing, which means an assured future to me; as it will mean to you and your father, if you have got the sense you were born with. This is business. Kindly omit melodrama—crude, and not at all your style, really," he finished, critically.

"This is nothing short of villainy. And not at all too crude for your style," said Mary Virginia.

He laughed good-humoredly. "Bad temper is vastly becoming to you," he told her. "It gives you a magnificent color."

And at that Mary Virginia looked at him with eyes in which the shadow of fear was deepening. Hard as nails, cold as ice, to him she was merely a means to an end. He did not even hate her. The guillotine does not hate those whom it decapitates, either; none the less it takes off their heads once they get in the way of the descending knife.

"I suggest," said Hunter, rising, "that you go home now and think the matter over carefully. Weigh what you and your father stand to gain against what you stand to lose. I do not press you for an immediate decision. You shall have a reasonable time for consideration." It was a threat and a command, thinly veiled.

All that night, unable to sleep, she did think the matter over carefully; she turned and twisted it about and about and saw it now from this angle and now from that; and the more she studied it in all its bearings the worse it grew. There was no escape from it.

Suppose, although she knew she could never, never hope to satisfactorily explain them, she nevertheless told her father about those letters and the part they were to be made play, now that his own affairs had reached a crisis? She could fancy herself telling him that he must shield himself behind her skirts if he would save himself from ruin. That ... to James Eustis!

Suppose that the Carolina trigger-finger slipped, as Hunter had nonchalantly admitted might happen: what then? But it is the woman in the case who always suffers the most and the longest; it is the woman, always, who pays the greater price. Her fears magnified the imagined evil, her pride was crucified.

What tortured her most was that they were actually making her party to a wreck that could easily be averted. Hunter had admitted that Eustis could weather the storm, if he were given time. Oh, to gain time for him, then! And she lay there, staring into the dark with wet eyes. How could she help him, she who was also snared?

And in desperation she hit upon a forlorn hope. She dared not speak out openly to anybody, she dared not flatly refuse Inglesby's pretensions, for that would be to invite the avalanche. What she proposed to herself was to hold him off as long as she could. She would not be definite until the last possible minute. Always there was the chance that by some miracle of mercy Eustis might be able to meet those notes when they fell due. Let him do that, and she would then tell him everything. But not now. He was bearing too much, without that added burden.

It cost her a supreme effort to face the situation as it affected herself and Laurence. Life without Laurence! The bare thought of it tested her heart and showed her how inalienably it belonged to him. But under all his lovingness and his boyishness, Laurence had a sternness, a ruggedness as adamantine as one of Cromwell's Iron-sides. With him to know would be to act. Well—he mustn't know. It terrified her to think of just what might happen, if Laurence knew.

Under the circumstances there seemed but one course open to her—to give up Laurence, and that without explanations. For his own sake she had to keep silent—just as Hunter had known she would. What Laurence must think of her, even the loss of his affection and respect, would be part of the price paid for having been a fool.

In the most unobtrusive manner they kept in touch with her. Hunter had so adroitly wirepulled, and so deftly softened and toned down Inglesby's crudities, that Mrs. Eustis had become the latter's open champion. Condescending and patronizing, she liked the importance of lending a very rich man her social countenance. She insisted that he was misunderstood. Men of great fortunes are always misunderstood. Nobody considers it a virtue to be charitable to the rich—they save all their charity for the poor, who as often as not are undeserving, and are generally insanitary as well. Mrs. Eustis thanked her heavenly Father she was a woman of larger vision, and never thought ill of a man just because he happened to be a millionaire. Millionaires have got souls, she hoped? And hearts? Mrs. Eustis said she knew Mr. Inglesby's noble heart, my dear, whether others did or not.

Compelled to apparently jilt Laurence, Mary Virginia sank deeper and deeper into the slough of despond. A terror of Inglesby's power, as of something supernatural, was growing upon her, a terror almost childish in its intensity. He had begun to occupy the niche vacated by the Boogerman her Dah had threatened her with in her nursery. She could barely conceal this terror, save that an instinct warned her that to let him know she feared him would be fatal. And she felt for him a physical repulsion strong enough to be nauseating.

The fact that she disdained and perhaps even disliked him and made no effort to conceal her feelings, did not in the least ruffle his bland complacency nor affront his pride. He knew that not even an Inglesby could hope to find a Mary Virginia more than once in a lifetime, and the haughtier she was the more she pleased him; it added to his innate sense of power, and this in itself endeared her to him inexpressibly.

But as the girl still held out stubbornly, trying to evade the final word that would force a climax disastrous any way she viewed it, Inglesby's patience was exhausted. He was determined to make her come to terms by the word of her own mouth, and he had no doubt that her final word must be Yes; perhaps a Yes reluctant enough, but nevertheless one to which he meant to hold her.

To make that final demand more impressive, Hunter was not entrusted with the interview. Hunter may have been doubtful as to the wisdom of this, but Inglesby could no longer forego the delight of dealing with Mary Virginia personally. On the Saturday night, then, Mrs. Eustis being absent, Mr. Inglesby, manicured, massaged, immaculate, shaven and shorn, called in person; and not daring to refuse, Mary Virginia received him, wondering if for her the end of the world had not come.

He made a mistake, for Mary Virginia had her back against the wall, literally waiting for the Eustis roof to fall. But he could not forego the pleasure of witnessing her pride lower its crest to him. He did not relish a go-between, even such a successful one as his secretary. He had made up his mind that she should have until to-morrow night, Sunday, to come to a decision—just that long, and not another hour. He was not getting younger; he wanted to marry, to found a great establishment as whose mistress Mary Virginia should shine. And she was making him lose time.

What Inglesby succeeded in doing was to bring her terror to a head, and to fill her with a sick loathing of him. Under the smooth protestations, the promises, the threats veiled with hateful and oily smiles, the man himself was revealed: crude, brutal, dominant, ruthless, a male animal bull-necked and arrogant, with small eyes, wide nostrils, cruel moist lips, sensual fat white hands she hated. And he was so sure of her! Mary Virginia found herself smarting under that horrible sureness.

Perfectly at his ease, inclined to be familiar and jocose, he looked insolently about the lovely old room that had never before held such a suitor for a daughter of that house. Watching her with the complacent eyes of an accepted lover, assuming odious airs of proprietorship such as made one wish to throttle him, he was in no hurry to go. It seemed to her that black and withering years rolled over her head before he could bring himself to rise to take his departure. Death could hardly be colder to a mortal than she had been to this man all the evening, and yet it had not disconcerted him in the least!

He stood for a moment regarding her with the eyes of possession. "And to think that to-morrow night I shall have the right to openly claim you as my promised wife!" he exulted. "You can't realize what it means to a man to be able to say to the world that the most beautiful woman in it is his!"

Directly in front of her hung the portrait of the founder of the house in Carolina, the cavalier who had fled to the new world when Charles Stuart's head fell in the old one. It was a fine and proud face, the eyes frank and brave, the mouth firm and sweet. The girl looked from it to George Inglesby's, and found herself unable to speak. But as she stood before him, tall and proud and pale, the loveliness, the appealing charm of her, went like a strong wine to the man's head. With a quick and fierce movement he seized her hand and covered it with hot and hateful kisses.

At the touch of his lips cold horror seized her. She dragged her hand free and waved him back with a splendid indignation. But Inglesby was out of hand; he had taken the bit between his teeth, and now he bolted.

"Do you think I'm made of stone?" he bellowed, and the mask slipped altogether. There was no hypocrisy about Inglesby now; this was genuine. "Well, I'm not! I'm a man, a flesh-and-blood man, and I'm crazy for you—and you're mine! You're mine, and you might just as well face the music and get acquainted with me, first as last. Understand?

"I'm not such a bad sort—what's the matter with me, anyhow? Why ain't I good enough for you or any other woman? Suppose I'm not a young whippersnapper with his head full of nonsense and his pockets full of nothing, can the best popinjay of them all do for you what I can? Can any of 'em offer you what I can offer? Let him try to: I'll raise his bid!

"Here—don't you stand there staring at me as if I'd tried to slit your throat just because I've kissed your hand. Suppose I did? Why shouldn't I kiss your hand if I want to? It's my hand, when all's said and done, and I'll kiss it again if I feel like it. No, no, beauty, I won't, not if it's going to make you look at me like that! Why, queen, I wouldn't frighten you for worlds! I love you too much to want to do anything but please you. I'd do anything, everything, just to please you, to make you like me! You'll believe that, won't you?" And he held out his hands with a supplicating and impassioned gesture.

"Why can't we be friends? Try to be friends with me, Mary Virginia! You would, if you only knew how much I love you. Why, I've loved you ever since that first day I saw you, after you'd come back home. I was going into the bank, and I turned, and there you were! You had on a gray dress, and you wore violets, a big bunch of them. I can smell them yet. God! It was all up with me! I was crazy about you from the start, and it's been getting worse and worse ... worse and worse!

"You don't know all I mean to do for you, beauty! I'm going to give you this little old world to play with. Nothing's too good for you. Look at me! I'm not an old man yet—I've only just begun to make money for you. Now be a little kind to me. You've got to marry me, you know. Look here: you kiss me good-night, just once, of your own free will, and I swear you shall have anything under the sky you ask me for. Do you want a string of pearls that will make yours look like a child's playpretty? I'll hang a million dollars around that white throat of yours!"

But there came into the girl's eyes that which gave him pause. They stood staring at each other; and slowly the wine-dark flush faded from his face and left him livid. Little dents came about his nose, and his lips puckered as if the devil had pinched them together.

"No?" said he thickly, and his jaw hardened, and his eyes narrowed under his square forehead. "No? You won't, eh? Too fine and proud? My lady, you'll learn to kiss me when I tell you to, and glad enough of the chance, before you and I finish with each other! Why, you—I—Oh, good God! Why do you rouse the devil in me, when I only want to be friends with you?"

But she, with a ghastly face, turned swiftly and with her head held high walked out of the room, passed through the wide hall, and ascended the stairs, without even bidding him goodnight. Let him take his dismissal as he would—she could stand no more!

Once in her own room, Mary Virginia dismissed Nancy for the night. She had to be alone, and the colored woman was an irrepressible magpie. Furiously she scrubbed her hands, as if to remove the taint of his touch. That he had dared! Her teeth chattered. She could barely save herself from screaming aloud. She bathed her face, dashed some toilet water over herself, and fell into a chair, limp and unnerved.

One day!

She was facing the end and she knew it. Because she had to say No. She had never for one minute admitted to herself the possibility of her own surrender. She could give up Laurence, since she had to; but she could not accept Inglesby. Anything rather than that! At the most, all she had hoped was to evade that final No until the last moment, in order to give Eustis what poor respite she could. Only her great love for him had enabled her to do that much. And it had not helped. When she thought of the wreck that must come, she beat her hands together, softly, in sheer misery. It was like standing by and watching some splendid ship being pounded to pieces on the rocks.

Only her innate bravery and her real and deep religious instinct saved her from altogether sinking into inertia and despair. She had to arouse herself. Other women had faced situations equally as impossible and unbearable as hers, and the best of them had not allowed themselves to be whipped into tame and abject submission. Even at the worst they had snatched the great chance to live their own lives in their own way. As for her, surely there must be some way out of this snarl, some immediate way that led to honorable freedom, even without hope. But how and where was she to find any way open to her, between now and to-morrow night?

On her dressing table, with a handful of trinkets upon it, lay the tray that the Butterfly Man had sent her when she was graduated. Chin in hands, Mary Virginia stared absently enough at the brightly colored butterflies she had been told to remember were messengers bearing on their wings the love of the Parish House people. Why—why—of course! The Parish House people! They had blamed her, because they hadn't understood. But if she were to ask the Parish House people for any help within their power, she could be sure of receiving it without stint.

If she could get to the Parish House without anybody knowing where she was, Inglesby and Hunter would be balked of that interview to-morrow night. The worst was going to happen anyhow, but if she couldn't save herself from anything else, at least she could save herself from facing them alone. To be able to do that, she would go now, in the middle of the night, and tell the Padre everything. Unnerved as she was, she couldn't face the hours between now and to-morrow morning here, by herself. She had to get to the Parish House.

It was then after eleven. Nancy having been dismissed for the night, she had no fear of being interrupted. She made her few preparations, switched off the light, and sat down to wait until she could be sure that all the servants were abed, and the streets deserted. She felt as if she were a forlorn castaway upon a pinpoint of land, with immeasurable dark depths upon either side.

The midnight express screeched and was gone. She switched on the light for a last look about her pretty, pleasant room. There was a snapshot of the Parish House people upon her mantel, and she nodded to it, gravely, before she once more plunged the room into darkness.

Noiselessly she slipped downstairs and let herself out. The midnight air was bitingly cold, but she did not feel it. With one handsatchel holding all she thought she could honestly lay claim to, Mary Virginia turned her back upon the home that had sheltered her all her life, but that wouldn't be able to shelter its own people much longer, because Inglesby was going to take it away from them. It made her wince to think of him as master under that roof. The old house deserved a happier fate.

At best the Parish House could be only a momentary stopping-place. What lay beyond she didn't know. What her fate held further of evil she couldn't guess. But at least, she thought, it would be in her own hands. It wasn't. Unexpectedly and mercifully was it put into the abler and stronger hands of the Butterfly Man.

Now, that night Flint had found himself unable to work. He was unaccountably depressed. He couldn't read; even the Bible, opened at his favorite John, hadn't any comfort for him. He shoved the book aside, snatched hat and overcoat, and fled to his refuge the healing out-of-doors.

He trudged the country roads for awhile, then turned toward town, intending to pass by the Eustis house. It wasn't the first time he had passed the Eustis house at night of late, and just to see it asleep in the midst of its gardens steadied him and made him smile at the vague fears he entertained.

He was almost up to the gate when a girl emerged from it, and he stiffened in his tracks, for it was Mary Virginia. A second later, and they stood face to face.

"Don't be alarmed, it is I, Flint," he said in his quiet voice. And then he asked directly: "Why are you out alone at this hour? Where are you going?"

"To—to the Parish House," she stammered. She was greatly startled by his sudden appearance.

"Exactly," said the Butterfly Man, with meaning, and relieved her of her satchel. He asked no questions, offered no comments; but as quickly as he could he got her to his own rooms, put Kerry on guard, and ran for help.



CHAPTER XVIII

ST. STANISLAUS CROOKS HIS ELBOW

Mary Virginia's voice trailed into silence and she sank back into her chair, staring somberly at the fire. Her face marked with tears, the long braids of her hair over her shoulders, she looked so like a sad and chidden child that the piteousness of her would have moved and melted harder hearts than ours.

The Butterfly Man had listened without an interruption. He sat leaning slightly forward, knees crossed, the left arm folded to support the elbow of the right, and his chin in his cupped right hand. His eyes had the piercing clear directness of an eagle's; they burned with an unwavering pale flame. Shrewder far than I, he saw the great advantage of knowing the worst, of at last thoroughly understanding Hunter and Inglesby and the motives which moved them. He had, too, a certain tolerance. These two had merely acted according to their lights; he had not expected any more or less, therefore he was not surprised now into an undue condemnation.

But the fighting instinct rose rampant in me. My hands are De Rance hands, the hands of soldiers as well as of priests, and they itched for a weapon, preferably a sword. Horrified and astonished, suffocating with anger, I had no word at command to comfort this victim of abominable cunning. Indeed, what could I say; what could I do? I looked helplessly at the Butterfly Man, and the stronger man looked back at me, gravely and impassively.

"But what is to be done?" I groaned.

He seemed to know, for he said at once:

"Call Madame. Tell her to bring some extra wraps. I am going to take Mary Virginia home, and Madame will go with us."

"But why shouldn't she stay here?"

"Because she'd better be at home to-morrow morning, parson. We're not supposed to know anything of her affairs, and I'd rather she didn't appear at the Parish House. Also, she needs sleep right now more than she needs anything else, and one sleeps better in one's own bed. Madame will see that she goes to hers and stays there."

I was perfectly willing to commit the affair into John Flint's hands. But Mary Virginia demurred.

"No. I want to stay here! I don't want to go home, Padre."

Flint shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said mildly, "but I'm going to take you home." He looked so inexorable that Mary Virginia shrugged her shoulders.

"Oh, all right, Mr. Flint, I'll go," said she. "What difference does it make? I'll even go to bed—as I'm told." And she added in a tone of indescribable bitterness: "I have read that men lie down and sleep peacefully the night before they are hanged. Well, I suppose they could: they hadn't anything but death to face on the morrow, but I—" and she caught her breath.

"Why not take it for granted to-night that you'll be looked after to-morrow?" suggested Flint. "Mary Virginia, nothing's ever so bad as it's going to be."

"Oh, yes, I'll be looked after to-morrow!" said she, bitingly. "Mr. Inglesby will see to that!" She covered her face with her hands.

"Oh, I don't know!" The Butterfly Man shut his mouth on the words like a knife. "Inglesby may think he's going to, but somehow I think he won't."

"Ah!" said she scornfully. "Perhaps you'll be able to stop him?"

"Perhaps," he agreed. "If I don't, somebody or something else will. It's very unlucky to be too lucky too long. You see, everybody's got to get what's coming to them, and it generally comes hardest when they've tied themselves up to the notion they're It. Somehow I fancy Mr. Inglesby's due to come considerable of a cropper around about now."

"Between now and to-morrow night?" she wondered, with sad contempt.

"Why not? Anything can happen between a night and a night." He looked at her with shrewd appreciation: "You have taken yourself so seriously," said he, "that you've pretty nearly muddled yourself into being tragic. Those fellows knew who they were dealing with when they tackled you. They could bet the limit you'd never tell. So long as you didn't tell, so long as they had nobody but you to deal with, they had you where they wanted you. But now maybe things might happen that haven't been printed in the program."

"What things?" she mocked somberly.

"I don't know, yet," he admitted, "But I do know there is always a way out of everything except the grave. The thing is to find the right way. That's up to the Padre and me. Parson, would you mind going after Madame now, please? The sooner we go the better."

Have I not said my mother is the most wonderful of women? I waked her in the small hours with the startling information that Mary Virginia was downstairs in John Flint's workroom, and that she herself must dress and accompany her home. And my mother, though she looked her stark bewilderment, plagued me with no questions.

"She is in great trouble, and she needs you. Hurry."

Madame slid out of her bed and reached for her neatly folded garments.

"Wait in the hall, Armand; I will be with you in ten minutes." And she was, wrapped and hatted.

Once in the workroom, she cast a deep and searching woman-glance at the pale girl in the chair. Her face was so sweet with motherliness and love and pity, and that profound comprehension the best women show to each other, that I felt my throat contract. Gathered into Madame's embrace, Mary Virginia clung to her old friend dumbly. Madame had but one question:

"My child, have you told John Flint and my son what this trouble of yours is?"

"Yes; I had to, I had to!"

"Thank the good God for that!" said my mother piously. "Now we will go home, dearest, and you can sleep in peace—you have nothing more to worry about!"

The clasp of the comforting arms, the sweet serenity of the mild eyes, and above all the little lady's perfect confidence, aroused Mary Virginia out of her torpor. She felt that she no longer stood alone at the mercy of the merciless. Bundled in the wraps my mother had provided, she paused at the door.

"I think you will forgive me any trouble I may cause you, because I am sure all of you love me. And whatever comes, I will be brave enough to face and to bear it. Padre, dear Padre, you understand, don't you?"

"My child, my darling child, I understand."

"I'll be back in half an hour, parson," the Butterfly Man remarked meaningly. Then the three melted into the night.

Left alone, I was far from sharing Madame's simple faith in our ability to untangle this miserable snarl. I knew now the temper of the men we had to deal with. I also understood that in cases like this the Southern trigger-finger is none too steady. Seen from a certain point of view, if ever men deserved an unconditional and thorough killing, these two did. Yet this homicidal specter turned me cold, for Mary Virginia's sake.

For Eustis himself I could see nothing but ruin ahead, but I wished passionately to help the dear girl who had come to me in her stress. But what was one to do? How should one act?

I sat there dismally enough, my chin sunk upon my breast; for as a plotter, a planner, a conspirator, I am a particularly hopeless failure. I have no sense of intrigue, and the bare idea of plotting reduces me to stupefaction.

Perhaps because I am a priest by instinct, I always discover in myself the instant need of prayer when confronted by the unusual and the difficult. I have prayed over seemingly hopeless problems in my time and I think I have been led to a clear solution of many of them. Major Cartwright insists that this is merely because I bring desire and will to bear upon a given point and so release an irresistible natural force. He says prayer is as much a science as, say, mathematics—such and such its units, and such and such its fixed results. Well, maybe so. All I know is that when I beseech aid I think I receive it.

So I ran over to the church and let myself in. I felt that at least for a few minutes I must kneel before the altar and implore help for her who was like my own child to me.

The empty church was quite black save for the sanctuary lamp and the little red votive lights burning before the statues of the saints and of our Lady. All these many little lights only cast the veriest ghosts of brightness upon the darkness, but the white altar was revealed by the larger glow of the sanctuary lamp. There it shone with a mild and pure luster, unfailing, calm, steady, burning through the night, the sign and symbol of that light of Love which cannot fail, but burns and burns and burns forever and forever before an altar that is the infinite universe itself.

My little-faith, my ready-to-halt faith, raised its head above the encompassing waters; the wild turmoil and torment died away: ... after the earthquake and the fire and the whirlwind, the still small voice....

Then I, to whom life at best can only be working and waiting, was for a space able to pray for her to whom life should be "as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth, even a clear morning without clouds; and as the tender grass by clear shining after rain." I remembered her as she had first come to me, a little loving child to fill my empty heart, the poor clay heart that cannot even hold fast to the love of God but by these frail all-powerful ties of simple human affection. And when I thought of her now, so young and so sore-beset, a bird caught in the snare of the fowler, I beat my breast for pity and for grief. Oh, how should I help her, how!

I turned my head, and there stood St. Stanislaus upon his pedestal, the memorial lights flickering upon his long robe, his smooth boy's face, his sheaf of lilies. I regarded him rather absently. Something stirred in my consciousness; something I always had to remember in connection with St. Stanislaus....

Across my mind as across a screen flashed a series of pictures—a mangled tramp carried into the Parish House, my mother watching with a concerned and shocked face, and the hall mud-stained by the trampling feet of the clumsy bearers; the shaggy Poles, caps off, turning over to me as to high authority the heavy oilskin package they had found; I opening that package later and standing amazed and startled before its contents; and that same package, hidden under my cassock, carried over to the church and placed for security and secrecy in the keeping of the little saint. Well, that had been quite right; there had been nothing else to do; one had to be secret and careful when one had in one's keeping the tools of that notorious burglar, Slippy McGee.

Small wonder that I did not connect those pictures with the fate of Mary Virginia Eustis! No, I did not immediately grasp their tremendous bearing upon the petitions I was repeating. And all the while, with a dull insistence, an enraging persistence, they flickered before the eyes of my memory—the Poles, the screaming cursing tramp; Westmoreland pondering aloud as to why he had been permitted to save so apparently worthless a life; and the little saint hiding from the eyes of men all traces of lost Slippy McGee. Nor, more curiously yet, did I connect them with the Butterfly Man. The Butterfly Man was somebody else altogether, another and a different person, a man of whom even one's secretest thoughts were admiring and respectful. He was so far removed from the very shadow of such things as these, that it did one's conscience a sort of violence to think of him in connection with them. I tried to dismiss the memories from my mind. I wished to concentrate wholly upon the problem of Mary Virginia.

And then that mysterious, hidden self-under-self that lives in us far, far beneath thought and instinct and conscience and heredity and even consciousness itself, rose to the surface with a message:

Slippy McGee had been the greatest cracksman in all America.... "Honest to God, skypilot, I can open any box made, easy as easy!" ... And even as his tools were hidden in St. Stanislaus, Slippy McGee himself was hidden in John Flint.

Recoiling, I clung to the altar railing. What dreadful thing was I contemplating, what fearful temptation was assailing me, here under the light of the sanctuary lamp? I looked reproachfully at St. Stanislaus, as if that seraphic youth had betrayed my confidence. I suspected him of being too anxious to rid himself of the ambiguous trust imposed upon him without so much as a by-your-leave. Perhaps he was secretly irked at the use to which his painted semblance had been put, and seized this first opportunity to extricate himself from a position in which the boldest saint of them all might well hesitate to find himself.

I began to consider John Flint as he was, the work he had accomplished, the splendid structure of that life slowly and laboriously made over and lived so cleanly in the light of day. Not only had that old evil personality been sloughed off like a larval skin; he had come forth from it another creature, a being lovable, wise, tender, full of charm. Even the hint of melancholy that was becoming more and more a part of him endeared him to others, for the broader and brighter the light into which he was steadily mounting, the more marked and touching was this softening shadow.

And I who had been the accoucheur of his genius, I who had watched and prayed and ministered beside the cradle of his growth, was I of all men to threaten his overthrow? Alas, what madness was upon me that I was evoking before the very altar the grim ghost of Slippy McGee?

There passed before me in procession the face of Laurence with all its boyish bloom stripped from it and the glory of its youth vanished; and the bowed and humbled head of James Eustis, one of the large and noble souls of this world; and the innocent beauty of Mary Virginia, wistfully appealing; followed them the beautiful ruthless face of Hunter, dazzlingly blonde, gold-haired as Baldur; and the piglike eyes and heavy jowl of Inglesby, brutally dominant; and then the dear whimsical visage of the Butterfly Man himself. They passed; and I fell to praying, with a sort of still desperation, for all of us.

And all the while the steady and rosy light of the sanctuary lamp fell upon me, and the little lights flickered before the silent saints. I took myself in hand, forced myself into self-control. I did not minimize one risk nor slur one danger. I knew exactly what was at stake. And having done this, I decided upon my course:

"If he has thought of this himself, then I will help. But if he has not, I will not suggest it, no, no matter what happens."

I told myself I would say ten more Hailmarys, and I said them, with an Ourfather at the end. And without further praying I got to my feet. The church seemed to be full of breathless whisperings, as if it watched and listened while I moved over to Stanislaus and tipped him backward. He is a rather heavy and sizable boy for all his saintly slimness. Up in the hollow inside, in the crook of his arm, lay the oilskin package he had kept these long years through, waiting for to-night.

"If ever you prayed for mortals in peril, pray, for the love of God, for all of us this night!" I told him. And with the package in a fold of my cassock I went back across the dark garden and let myself into the Butterfly Man's rooms, and was hardly inside the door when he himself returned.

"Didn't meet a soul. And they got in without waking anybody in the house," said he complacently, rubbing his hands before the fire. "I waited until they showed a light upstairs. She's all right, now Madame's with her."

"Have you—have you thought of anything—any way, John?" I quavered, and wondered if he heard my heart dunting against my ribs.

"Why, I've thought that she's got until to-morrow night to come to terms," said he, and turned to face me. "And she can't accept them. Nobody could—that is, not a girl like her. As for Inglesby, he might push Eustis under, but he wouldn't have been so cocksure of her if it wasn't for those letters. She's been afraid of what might happen if Eustis or Laurence found out about them—somebody ran the risk of being put to bed with a shovel. There's where they had her. A bit unbearable to think of, isn't it?" He spoke so mildly that I looked up with astonishment and some disappointment.

"Why," said I, ruefully, "if that's as far as you've gone, we are still at the starting point."

"No need to go farther and fare worse, parson," said he, equably. "I saw that the first minute I could see anything but red. Yet do you know, when she was telling us about it, I thought like a fool of everything but the right thing, from sandbagging and shanghaing Inglesby, down to holding up Hunter with an automatic?

"When I got my reason on straight, I went back to the starting point—the letters, parson, the letter in the safe in Hunter's office. Given the letters she'd be free—the one thing Inglesby doesn't want to happen. We've got to have those letters."

My mouth was parched as with fever and I saw him through a blur.

"I don't know," he went on, "if you agree with me, parson, but to my mind the best way to fight the devil is with fire. What did you do with those tools?"

"Tools?" in a dry whisper. "Tools, John?"

"Tools. Kit. Layout. You had them. Could you put your hand on them in a hurry to-night? Don't stare so, man! And for the Lord's love don't you tell me you destroyed them! What did you do with my tools?"

The four winds roared in my ears, and one lifted the hair on my scalp, as if the Rider on the Pale Horse had passed by. By way of reply I placed a heavy package on the table before him, slumped into my chair, and covered my face with my hands. Oh, Stanislaus, little saint, what had we done between us to-night to the Butterfly Man?

When I looked up again he had risen. With his hands gripping the edge of the table until the knuckles showed white, and his neck stretched out, he was staring with all his eyes. A low whistle escaped him. Wonder, incredulity, a sort of ironic amusement, and a growing, iron-jawed determination, expressed themselves in his changing countenance. Once or twice he wet his lips and swallowed. Then he sat down again, deliberately, and fixed upon me a long and somewhat disconcerting stare, as if he were rearranging and tabulating his estimate of Father Armand Jean De Rance. He took his head in his hands, and with slitted eyes considered the immediate course of action to which the possession of that package committed him. One surmised that he was weighing and providing for every possible contingency.

Tentatively he spread out his fine hands, palms uppermost, and flexed them; then, turning them, he laid them flat upon the table and again spread out his fingers. They were notable hands—shapely, supple, strong as steel, the thin-skinned fingertips as delicate and sensitive of touch as the antennae he was used to handling. They were even more capable than of old, because of the exquisite work they had been trained to accomplish, work to which only the most skilled lapidary's is comparable. Apparently satisfied, he drew the bundle toward him. Before he opened it he lifted those cool, blue, and ironic eyes to mine; and I am sure I was by far the paler and more shaken of the two.

"They were in the crook of St. Stanislaus' arm." I tried to keep my voice steady. "I was praying—when you were gone." Somehow, I did not find it easy to explain to him. "And ... I remembered.... And I brought them with me ... so in case you also ... remembered—" I could go no further. I broke into a sort of groaning cry: "Oh, John, John! My son, my son!"

"Steady!" said he. "Of course you remembered, parson. It's the only way. Didn't I tell her there's always a way out? Well, here it is!" His funny, twisted smile came to his lips; it twisted the heart in my breast. No thought of himself, of what this thing might mean to him, seemed to cross his mind.

"I prayed," said I, almost sobbing, "I prayed. And, John, there stood St. Stanislaus—" I stopped again, choking.

He nodded, understandingly. He was methodically spreading out the not unbeautiful instruments. And as he picked them up one by one, handling them with his strong and expert fingers and testing each with a hawk-eyed scrutiny, a most curious and subtle change stole over the Butterfly Man.

I felt as if I were witnessing the evocation of something superhuman. Horrified and fascinated, I saw what might be called the apotheosis of Slippy McGee, so far above him was it, come back and subtly and awfully blend with my scientist. It was as if two strong and powerful individualities had deliberately joined forces to forge a more vital being than either, since the training, knowledge, skill and intellect of both would be his to command. If such a man as this ever stepped over the deadline he would not be merely "the slickest cracksman in America"; he would be one of the master criminals of the earth. I fancy he must have felt this intoxicating new access of power, for there emanated from him something of a fierce and exalted delight. A potentiality, as yet neither good nor evil, he suggested a spiritual and physical dynamo.

He gave a tigerish purr of pleasure over the tools, handling them with the fingers of the artist and admiring them with the eyes of the connoisseur. "The best I could get. All made to order. Tested blue steel. I never kicked at the price, and you wouldn't believe me if I told you what this layout cost in cold cash. But they paid. Good stuff always pays in the long run. It was lucky I winded the cops on that last job, or I'd have had to leave them. As it was, I just had time to grab them up before I hit the trail for the skyline. They don't need anything but a little rubbing—a saint's elbow must be a snug berth. I wish I had some juice, though."

"Juice?"

"Nitroglycerine," very gently, as to a child. "It does not make very much noise and it saves time when you're in a hurry—as you generally are, in this business," he smiled at me quizzically. "Not that one can't get along without it." The swift fingers paused for a fraction of a second to give a steel drill an affectionate pat. "I used to know one of the best ever, who never used anything but a particular drill, a pet bit, and his ear. Somebody snitched though, so the last I heard of him he was doing a twenty-year stretch. Pity, too. He was an artist in his line, that fellow. And his taste in neckties I have never seen equaled." The Butterfly Man's voice, evenly pitched and pleasantly modulated, a cultivated voice, was quite casual.

He gathered his tools together and replaced them in the old worn case. "Wonder if that safe is a side-bolt?" he mused. "Most likely. I dare say it's only the average combination. A one-armed yegg could open most of the boxes in this town with a tin button-hook. Anyhow, it would have to be a new-laid lock I couldn't open. If he's left the letters in the safe we're all right—so here's hoping he has. I certainly don't want to go to his room unless I have to. Hunter's not the sort to sit on his hands, and I'm not feeling what you'd call real amiable."

A glance at his face, with little glinting devil-lights shining far back in his eyes, set me to babbling:

"Oh, no, no, no, no, that would never do! God forbid that you should go to his rooms! He must have left them in the safe! He had to leave them in the safe!"

"Sure he's left them in the safe: why shouldn't he?" he made light of my palpable fears. Slipping into his gray overcoat, he pulled on his felt hat, thrust his hands into his wellworn dogskin gloves, and picked up the package. Nobody in the world ever looked less like a criminal than this brown-faced, keen-eyed man with his pleasant bearing. Why, this was John Flint, the kindly bug-hunter all Appleboro loved, "that good and kind and Christian man, our brother John Flint, sometimes known as the Butterfly Man."

"Now, don't you worry any at all, parson," he was saying. "There's nothing to be afraid of. I'll take care of myself, and I'll get those letters if they're in existence. I've got to get them. What else was I born for, I'd like to know?"

The question caught me like a lash across the face.

"You were born," I said violently, "to win an honored name, to do a work of inestimable value. And you are deliberately and quixotically risking it, and I allow you to risk it, because a girl's happiness hangs in the balance! If you are detected it means your own ruin, for you could never explain away those tools. Yes! You are facing possible ruin and disgrace. You might have to give up your work for years—have you considered that? Oh, John Flint, stop a moment, and reflect! There is nothing in this for you, John, nothing but danger. No, there's nothing in it for you, except—"

He held up his hand, with a gesture of dignity and reproach.

"—except that I get my big chance to step in and save the girl I happen to love, from persecution and wretchedness, if not worse," said he simply. "If I can do that, what the devil does it matter what happens to me? You talk about name and career! Man, man, what could anything be worth to me if I had to know she was unhappy?"

The tides of emotion rushed over him and flooded his face into a shining-eyed passion nakedly unashamed and beautiful. And I had thought him casual, carelessly accepting a risk!

"Parson," he wondered, "didn't you know? No, I suppose it wouldn't occur to anybody that a man of my sort should love a girl of hers. But I do. I think I did the first time I ever laid eyes on her, and she a girl-kid in a red jacket, with curls about her shoulders and a face like a little new rose in the morning. Remember her eyes, parson, how blue they were? And how she looked at me, so friendly—me, mind you, as I was! And she handed me a Catocala moth, and she gave me Kerry. 'You're such a good man, Mr. Flint!' says she, and by God, she meant it! Little Mary Virginia! And she got fast hold of something in me that was never anybody's but hers, that couldn't ever belong to anybody but her, no, not if I lived for a thousand years and had the pick of the earth.

"It wasn't until she came back, though, that I knew I belonged to her who could never belong to me. If I was dead at one end of the world and she dead at the other, we couldn't be any farther apart than life has put us two who can see and speak to each other every day!"

"And yet—" he looked at me now and laughed boyishly, "and yet it isn't for Mayne, that she loves, it isn't for you, nor Eustis, nor any man but me alone to help her, by being just what I am and what I have been! Risks? Fail her? I? I couldn't fail her. I'll get those letters for her to-night, if Hunter has hidden them in the beam of his eye!" He turned to me with a sudden white glare of ferocity that appalled me. "I could kill him with my hands," said he, with a quiet cold deadliness to chill one's marrow, "and Inglesby after him, for what they've made her endure! When I think of to-night—that brute daring to touch her with his swine's mouth—I—I—"

His face was convulsed; but after a moment's fierce struggle the disciplined spirit conquered.

"No, there's been enough trouble for her without that, so they're safe from me, the both of them. I wouldn't do anything to imperil her happiness to save my own life. She was born to be happy—and she's going to have her chance. I'll see to that, Mary Virginia!"

The man seemed to grow, to expand, to tower giant-like before me. Next to the white heat of this lava-flow of pure feeling, all other loves lavished upon Mary Virginia during her fortunate life seemed dwarfed and petty. Beside it Inglesby's furious desire shrunk into a loathsome thing, small and crawling; and my own affection was only an old priest's; and even the strong and faithful love of Laurence appeared pale and boyish in the light of this majestic passion which gave all and in return asked only the right to serve and to save.

"Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm; for love is strong as death ...

"Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned."

Trying desperately to cling to such rags and tatters of common sense as I could lay hold upon:

"There is your duty to yourself," I managed to say. "Yes, yes, one owes a great duty to oneself and one's work, John. You are risking too much—name, friends, honor, work, freedom. For God's sake, John, do not underestimate the danger. You have not had time to consider it."

"Ho! Listen to the parson preaching self-interest!" he mocked. "He's a fine one to do that—at this hour of his life!"

"I tell you you endanger everything," I insisted. I might bring that package, but at least he shouldn't rush upon the knife unwarned.

"I know that—I'm no fool. And I tell you it's worth while. To-night makes me and my whole life worth while, the good and the bad of it together. Risks? I'll take all that's coming. You stay here and say some prayers for me, parson, if it makes you feel any better. As for me, I'm off."

At that I lost my every last shred of commonplace everyday sanity, and let myself swing without further reserve into the wild current of the night.

"Oh, very well!" said I shrilly. "You will take chances, you will run risks, hein? My friend, you do not stir out of this house this night without me!" He stared, as well he might, but I folded my arms and stared back. Let him leave me, bent on such an errand? I to sit at home idly, awaiting the issue, whatever it might be?

"I mean it, John Flint. I am going with you. Was it not I, then, who saved those tools and had them ready to your hand? Whatever happens to you now happens to me as well. It is quite useless for you to argue, to scowl, to grind the teeth, to swear like that. And it will be dangerous to try to trick me: I am going!"

For he was protesting, violently and profanely. His profanity was so sincere, so earnest, so heartfelt, that it mounted into heights of real eloquence. Also, he did everything but knock me down and lock me indoors.

"Whatever happens to you happens to me," I repeated doggedly, and I was not to be moved. I had a hazy notion that somehow my being with him might protect him in case of any untoward happening, and minimize his risks.

I ran into his bedroom and clapped his best hat on my head, leaving my biretta on his bed; and I put on his new dark overcoat over my cassock. Both the borrowed garments were too big for me, the hat coming down over my ears, the coat-sleeves over my hands. I being as thin as a peeled willow-wand, and the clothes hanging upon me as on a clothes-rack, I dare say I cut a sad and ludicrous figure enough. Flint, standing watching me with his burglarious bundle under his arm, gave an irrepressible chuckle and his eyes crinkled.

"Parson," said he solemnly, "I've seen all sorts and sizes and colors and conditions of crooks, up and down the line, in my time and generation, but take it from me you're a libel and an outrage on the whole profession. Why, you crazy he-angel, you'd break their hearts just to look at you!" And he grinned. At a moment like that, he grinned, with a sort of gay and light-hearted diablerie. They are a baffling and inexplicable folk, the Irish. I suppose God loves the Irish because He doesn't really know how else to take them.

"It will break my own heart, and possibly my mother's and Mary Virginia's will break to keep it company, if anything evil happens to you this night," said I, severely. I was in no grinning humor, me.

He reached over and carefully buttoned, with one hand, the too-big collar about my throat. For a moment, with that odd, little-boy gesture of his, he held on to my sleeve. He looked down at me; and his eyes grew wide, his face melted into a whimsical tenderness.

"When you get to heaven, parson, you'll keep them all busy a hundred years and a day trying to cut and make a suit of sky clothes big enough to fit your real measure," said he, irrelevantly. "You real thing in holy sports, come on, since you've got to!" With that he blew out the light, and we stepped into the cold and windy night. It was ten minutes after three.

Armed with bottle-belt, knapsack, and net, many a happy night had I gone forth with the Butterfly Man a-hunting for such as we might find of our chosen prey. Armed now with nothing more nor less formidable than the black rosary upon which my hand shut tightly, I, Armand De Rance, priest and gentleman, walked forth with Slippy McGee in those hours when deep sleep falls upon the spirit of man, for to aid and encourage and abet and assist and connive at, nothing more nor less than burglary.



CHAPTER XIX

THE I O U OF SLIPPY MCGEE

The wind that precedes the dawn was blowing, a freakish and impish wind though not a vicious one. One might imagine it animated by those sportive and capricious nature-spirits an old Father of the church used to call the monkeys of God. Every now and then a great deluge of piled-up clouds broke into tossing billows and went rolling and tumbling across the face of the sky, and in and out of these swirling masses the high moon played hide-and-seek and the stars showed like pin-points. Such street lights as we have being extinguished at midnight, the tree-shaded sidewalks were in impenetrable shadow, the gardens that edged them were debatable ground, full of grotesque silhouettes, backgrounded by black bulks of silent houses all profoundly asleep. As for us, we also were shadows, whose feet were soundless on the sandy sidewalks. We moved in the dark like travelers in the City of Dreadful Night.