And so we came at last to the red-brick bank, approaching it by the long stretch of the McCall garden which adjoins it. For years there have been battered "For Sale" signs tacked onto its trees and fences, but no one ever came nearer purchasing the McCall property than asking the price. Folks say the McCalls believe that Appleboro is going to rival New York some of these days, and are holding their garden for sky-scraper sites.

I was very grateful to the McCall estimate of Appleboro's future, for the long stretch shadowed by their overgrown shrubbery brought us to the door leading to the upstair offices, without any possible danger of detection.

The bank had been a stately old home before business seized upon it, tore out its whole lower floors, and converted it into a strong and commodious bank. It is the one building in all Appleboro that keeps a light burning all night, a proceeding some citizens regard as unnecessary and extravagant; for is not Old Man Jackson there employed as night watchman? Old Man Jackson lost a finger and a piece of an ear before Appomattox, and the surrender deprived him of all opportunity to repay in kind. It was his cherished hope that "some smartybus crooks 'd try to git in my bank some uh these hyuh nights—an' I cert'nly hope to God they'll be Yankees, that's all."

Somehow, they hadn't tried. Perhaps they had heard of Old Man Jackson's watchful waiting and knew he wasn't at all too proud to fight. His quarters was a small room in the rear of the building, which he shared with a huge gray tomcat named Mosby. With those two on guard, Appleboro knew its bank was as impregnable as Gibraltar. But as nobody could possibly gain entrance to the vaults from above, the upper portion of the building, given over to offices, was of course quite unguarded.

One reached these upper offices by a long walled passageway to the left, where the sidewall of the bank adjoins the McCall garden. The door leading to this stairway is not flush with the street, but is set back some feet; this forms a small alcove, which the light flickering through the bank's barred windows does not quite reach.

John Flint stepped into this small cavern and I after him. As if by magic the locked door opened, and we moved noiselessly up the narrow stairs with tin signs tacked on them. At the head of the flight we paused while the flashlight gave us our bearings. Here a short passage opens into the wide central hall. Inglesby's offices are to the left, with the windows opening upon the tangled wilderness of the McCall place.

Right in front of us half a dozen sets of false teeth, arranged in a horrid circle around a cigar-box full of extracted molars such as made one cringe, grinned bitingly out of a glass case before the dentist's office door. The effect was of a lipless and ghastly laugh.

Before the next door a fatuously smiling pink-and-white bust simpered out of the Beauty Parlor's display-case, a bust elaborately coiffured with pounds of yellow hair in which glittered rhinestone buckles. Hair of every sort and shade and length was clustered about her, as if she were the presiding genius of some barbarian scalping-cult. Seen at that hour, in the pale luster of the flashlight, this sorry plunder of lost teeth and dead hair made upon one a melancholy impression, disparaging to humanity. I had scant time to moralize on hair and teeth, however, for Flint was stopping before a door the neat brass plate of which bore upon it:

Mr. Inglesby.

Mr. Inglesby had a desk downstairs in the bank, in the little pompous room marked "President's Office," where at stated hours and times he presided grandly; just as he had a big bare office at the mills, where he was rather easy of access, willing to receive any one who might chance to catch him in. But these rooms we were entering without permission were the sanctum sanctorum, the center of that wide web whose filaments embraced and ensnared the state. It would be about as easy to stroll casually into the Vatican for an informal chat with the Holy Father, to walk unannounced into the presence of the Dalai Lama, or to drop in neighborly on the Tsar of all the Russias, as to penetrate unasked into these offices during the day.

We stepped upon the velvet square of carpet covering the floor of what must have once been a very handsome guest chamber and was now a very handsome private office. One had to respect the simple and solid magnificence of the mahogany furnishings, the leather-covered chairs, the big purposeful desk. Above the old-fashioned marble mantel hung a life-sized portrait in oils of Inglesby himself. The artist had done his sitter stern justice—one might call the result retribution; and one wondered if Inglesby realized how immensely revealing it was. There he sat, solid, successful, informed with a sort of brutal egotism that never gives quarter. In despite of a malevolent determination to look pleasant, his smile was so much more of a threat than a promise that one could wish for his own sake he had scowled instead. He is a throaty man, is Inglesby; and this, with an uncompromising squareness of forehead, a stiffness of hair, and a hard hint of white in the eyes, lent him a lowering likeness to an unpedigreed bull.

John Flint cast upon this charming likeness one brief and pregnant glance.

"Regular old Durham shorthorn, isn't he?" he commented in a low voice. "Wants to charge right out of his frame and trample. Take a look at that nose, parson—like a double-barreled shotgun, for all the world! Beautiful brute, Inglesby. Makes you think of that minotaur sideshow they used to put over on the Greeks."

In view of Laurence and of Mary Virginia, I saw the resemblance.

Mr. Hunter's office was less formal than Mr. Inglesby's, and furnished with an exact and critical taste alien to Appleboro, where many a worthy citizen's office trappings consist of an alpaca coat, a chair and a pine table, three or four fly-specked calendars and shabby ledgers, and a box of sawdust. To these may sometimes be added a pot of paste with a dead cockroach in it, or a hound dog either scratching fleas or snapping at flies.

Here the square of carpet was brown as fallen pine-needles in October, the walls were a soft tan, the ceiling and woodwork ivory-toned. One saw between the windows a bookcase filled with handsomely bound books, and on top of it a few pieces of such old china as would enrapture my mother. The white marble mantel held one or two signed photographs in silver frames, a pair of old candlesticks of quaint and pleasing design, and a dull red pottery vase full of Japanese quince. There were a few good pictures on the walls—a gay impudent Detaille Lancer whose hardy face of a fighting Frenchman warmed one's heart; some sketches signed with notable American names; and above the mantel a female form clothed only in the ambient air, her long hair swept back from her shoulders, and a pearl-colored dove alighting upon her outstretched finger.

I suppose one might call the whole room beautiful, for even the desk was of that perfection of simplicity whose cost is as rubies. It was not, however, a womanish room; there was no slightest hint of femininity in its uncluttered, sane, forceful orderliness. It was rather like Hunter himself—polished, perfect, with a note of finality and of fitness upon it like a hall-mark. Nothing out of keeping, nothing overdone. Even the red petal fallen from the pottery vase on the white marble mantel was a last note of perfection.

Flint glanced about him with the falcon-glance that nothing escapes. For a moment the light stayed upon the nude figure over the mantel—the one real nude in all Appleboro, which cherishes family portraits of rakehelly old colonials in wigs, chokers, and tight-fitting smalls, and lolloping ladies with very low necks and sixteen petticoats, but where scandalized church-goers have been known to truss up a little plaster copy of the inane Greek Slave in a pocket-handkerchief, by way of needful drapery.

"What I want to know is, why a lady should have to strip to the buff just to play with a pigeon?" breathed John Flint, and his tone was captious.

It did not strike me as being to the last degree whimsical, improbable, altogether absurd, that such a man should pause at such a time to comment upon art as he thinks it isn't. On the contrary it was a consistent and coherent feature of that astounding nightmare in which we figured. The absurd and the impossible always happen in dreams. I am sure that if the dove on the woman's finger had opened its painted bill and spoken, say about the binomial theorem, or the Effect of Too Much Culture upon Women's Clubs, I should have listened with equal gravity and the same abysmal absence of surprise. I pattered platitudinously:

"The greatest of the Greeks considered the body divine in itself, my son, and so their noblest art was nude. Some moderns have thought there is no real art that is not nude. Truth itself is naked."

"Aha!" said my son, darkly. "I see! You take off your pants when you go out to feed your chickens, say, and you're not bughouse. You're art. Well, if Truth is naked, thank God the rest of us are liars!"

What I have here set down was but the matter of a moment. Flint brushed it aside like a cobweb and set briskly about his real business. Over in the recess next to the fireplace was the safe, and before this he knelt.

"Hold the light!" he ordered in a curt whisper. "There—like that. Steady now." My hand closed as well upon the rosary I carried, and I clung to the beads as the shipwrecked cling to a spar. The familiar feel of them comforted me.

I do not know to this day the make of that safe, nor its actual strength, and I have always avoided questioning John Flint about it. I do know it seemed incredibly strong, big, heavy, ungetatable. There was a dark-colored linen cover on top of it, embroidered with yellow marguerites and their stiff green leaves. And there was a brass fern-jar with claw feet, and rings on the sides that somehow made me think of fetters upon men's wrists.

"A little lower—to the left. So!" he ordered, and with steady fingers I obeyed. He stood out sharply in the clear oval—the "cleverest crook in all America" at work again, absorbed in his task, expert, a mind-force pitting itself against inanimate opposition. He was smiling.

The tools lay beside him and quite by instinct his hand reached out for anything it needed. I think he could have done his work blindfolded. Once I saw him lay his ear against the door, and I thought I heard a faint click. A gnawing rat might have made something like the noise of the drill biting its way. With this exception an appalling silence hung over the room. I could hardly breathe in it. I gripped the rosary and told it, bead after bead.

"Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death—"

There are moments when time loses its power and ceases to be; before our hour we seem to have stepped out of it and into eternity, in which time does not exist, and wherein there can be no relation of time between events. They stand still, or they stretch to indefinite and incredible lengths—all, all outside of time, which has no power upon them. So it was now. Every fraction of every second of every minute lengthened into centuries, eternities passed between minutes. The hashish-eater knows something of this terror of time, and I seemed to have eaten hashish that night.

I could still see him crouching before the safe; and all the while the eternities stretched and stretched on either side of us, infinities I could only partly bridge over with Hailmarys and Ourfathers.

"And lead us not into temptation ... but deliver us from evil ..."

Although I watched him attentively, being indeed unable to tear my eyes away from him, and although I held the light for him with such a steady hand, I really do not know what he did, nor how he forced that safe. I understand it took him a fraction over fourteen minutes.

"Here she comes!" he breathed, and the heavy door was open, revealing the usual interior, with ledgers, and a fairsized steel money-vault, which also came open a moment later. Flint glanced over the contents, and singled out from other papers two packages of letters held together by stout elastic bands, and with pencil notations on the corner of each envelope, showing the dates. He ran over both, held up the smaller of the two, and I saw, with a grasp of inexpressible relief, the handwriting of Mary Virginia.

He locked the vault, shut the heavy door of the rifled safe, and began to gather his tools together.

"You have forgotten to put the other packages back," I reminded him. I was in a raging fever of impatience to be gone, to fly with the priceless packet in my hand.

"No, I'm not forgetting. I saw a couple of the names on the envelopes and I rather think these letters will be a whole heap interesting to look over," said he, imperturbably. "It's a hunch, parson, and I've gotten in the habit of paying attention to hunches. I'll risk it on these, anyhow. They're in suspicious company and I'd like to know why." And he thrust the package into the crook of his arm, along with the tools.

The light was carefully flashed over every inch of the space we had traversed, to make sure that no slightest trace of our presence was left. As we walked through Inglesby's office John Flint ironically saluted the life-like portrait:

"You've had a ring twisted in your nose for once, old sport!" said he, and led me into the dark hall. We moved and the same exquisite caution we had exercised upon entering, for we couldn't afford to have Dan Jackson's keen old ears detect footfalls overhead at that hour of the morning. Now we were at the foot of the long stairs, and Flint had soundlessly opened and closed the last door between us and freedom. And now we were once more in the open air, under the blessed shadow of the McCall trees, and walking close to their old weather-beaten fence. The light was still shining in the bank, and I knew that that redoubtable old rebel of a watchman was peacefully sleeping with his gray guerilla of a marauding cat beside him. He could afford to sleep in peace. He had not failed in his trust, for the intruders had no designs upon the bank's gold. Questioned, he could stoutly swear that nobody had entered the building. In proof, were not all doors locked? Who should break into a man's office and rob his safe just to get a package of love-letters—if Inglesby made complaint?

I remember we stood leaning against the McCall fence for a few minutes, for my strength had of a sudden failed, my head spun like a top, and my legs wavered under me.

"Buck up!" said Flint's voice in my ear. "It's all over, and the baby's named for his Poppa!" His arm went about me, an arm like a steel bar. Half led, half carried, I went staggering on beside him like a drunken man, clutching a rosary and a packet of love-letters.

The streets were still dark and deserted, the whole town slept. But over in the east, when one glimpsed the skies above the trees, a nebulous gray was stealing upon the darkness; and the morning star blazed magnificently, in a space that seemed to have been cleared for it. Somewhere, far off, an ambitious rooster crowed to make the sun rise.

It took us a long time to reach home. It was all of a quarter past four when we turned into the Parish House gate, cut across the garden, and reached Flint's rooms. Faint, trembling in every limb, I fell into a chair, and through a mist saw him kneel and blow upon the coals of the expiring fire, upon which he dropped a lightwood knot. A ruddy glow went dancing up the chimney. Then he was beside me again. Very gently he removed hat and overcoat. And then I was sitting peacefully in the Morris chair, in my old cassock, and with my own old biretta on my head; and there was no longer that thin buzzing, shrill and torturing as a mosquito's, singing in my ears. At my knee stood Kerry, with his beautiful hazel eyes full of a grave concern; and beside him, calm and kind and matter-of-fact, the Butterfly Man himself stood watching me with an equal regard. I rubbed my forehead. The incredible had happened, and like all incredible things it had been almost ridiculously simple and easy of accomplishment. Here we were, we two, priest and naturalist, in our own workroom, with an old dog wagging his tail beside us. Could anything be more commonplace? The last trace of nightmare vanished, as smoke dispelled by the wind. If Mary Virginia's letters had not been within reach of my hand I would have sworn I was just awake out of a dream of that past hour.

"She has escaped from them, they cannot touch her, she is free!" I exulted. "John, John, you have saved our girl! No matter what they do to Eustis they can't drag her into the quicksands now."

But he went walking up and down, shoulders squared, face uplifted. One might think that after such a night he would have been humanly tired, but he had clean forgotten his body. His eyes shone as with a flame lit from inward, and I think there was on him what the Irish people call the Aisling, the waking vision. For presently he began to speak, as to Somebody very near him.

"Oh, Lord God!" said the Butterfly Man, with a reverent and fierce joy, "she's going to have her happiness now, and it wasn't holy priest nor fine gentleman you picked out to help her toward it—it was me, Slippy McGee, born in the streets and bred in the gutter, with the devil knows who for his daddy and a name that's none of his own! For that I'm Yours for keeps: You've got me.

"You've done all even God Almighty can do, given me more than I ever could have asked You for—and now it's up to me to make good—and I'll do it!"

There came to listening me something of the emotion I experienced when I said my first Mass—as if I had been brought so close to our Father that I could have put out my hand and touched Him. Ah! I had had a very small part to play in this man's redemption. I knew it now, and felt humbled and abashed, and yet grateful that even so much had been allowed me. Not I, but Love, had transformed a sinner and an outlaw into a great scientist and a greater lover. And I remembered Mary Virginia's childish hand putting into his the gray-winged Catocala, and how the little moth, raising the sad-colored wings worn to suit his surroundings, revealed beneath that disfiguring and disguising cloak the exquisite and flower-like loveliness of the underwings.

He paused in his swinging stride, and looked down at me a bit shyly.

"Parson—you see how it is with me?"

"I see. And I think she is the greater lady for it and you the finer gentleman," said I stoutly. "It would honor her, if she were ten times what she is—and she is Mary Virginia."

"She is Mary Virginia," said the Butterfly Man, "and I am—what I am. Yet somehow I feel sure I can care for her, that I can go right on caring for her to the end of time, without hurt to her or sorrow to me." And after a pause, he added, deliberately:

"I found something better than a package of letters to-night, parson. I found—Me."

For awhile neither of us spoke. Then he said, speculatively:

"Folks give all sorts of things to the church—dedicate them in gratitude for favors they fancy they've received, don't they? Lamps, and models of ships, and glass eyes and wax toes and leather hands, and crutches and braces, and that sort of plunder? Well, I'm moved to make a free-will offering myself. I'm going to give the church my kit, and you can take it from me the old Lady will never get her clamps on another set like that until Gabriel blows his trumpet in the morning. Parson, I want you to put those tools back where you had them, for I shall never touch them again. I couldn't. They—well, they're sort of holy from now on. They're my IOU. Will you do it for me?"

"Yes!" said I.

"I might have known you would!" said he, smiling. "Just one more favor, parson—may I put her letters in her hands, myself?"

"My son, my son, who but you should do that?" I pushed the package across the table.

"Great Scott, parson, here it is striking five o'clock, and you've been up all night!" he exclaimed, anxiously. "Here—no more gassing. You come lie down on my bed and snooze a bit. I'll call you in plenty of time for mass."

I was far too spent and tired to move across the garden to the Parish House. I suffered myself to be put to bed like a child, and had my reward by falling almost immediately into a dreamless sleep, nor did I stir until he called me, a couple of hours later. He himself had not slept, but had employed the time in going through the letters open on his table. He pointed to them now, with a grim smile.

"Parson!" said he, and his eyes glittered. "Do you know what we've stumbled upon? Dynamite! Man, anybody holding that bunch of mail could blow this state wide open! So much for a hunch, you see!"

"You mean—"

"I mean I've got the cream off Inglesby's most private deals, that's what I mean! I mean I could send him and plenty of his pals to the pen. Everybody's been saying for years that there hasn't been a rotten deal pulled off that he didn't boss and get away with it. But nobody could prove it. He's had the men higher-up eating out of his hand—sort of you pat my head and I'll pat yours arrangement—and here's the proof, in black and white. Don't you understand? Here's the proof: these get him with the goods!

"These," he slapped a letter, "would make any Grand Jury throw fits, make every newspaper in the state break out into headlines like a kid with measles, and blow the lid off things in general—if they got out.

"Inglesby's going to shove Eustis under, is he? Not by a jugfull. He's going to play he's a patent life-preserver. He's going to be that good Samaritan he's been shamming. Talk about poetic justice—this will be like wearing shoes three sizes too small for him, with a bunion on every toe!" And when I looked at him doubtfully, he laughed.

"You can't see how it's going to be managed? Didn't you ever hear of the grapevine telegraph? Well then, dear George receives a grapevine wireless bright and early to-morrow morning. A word to the wise is sufficient."

"He will employ detectives," said I, uneasily.

The Butterfly Man looked at me quizzically.

"With an eagle eye and a walrus mustache," said he, grinning. "Sure. But if the plainclothes nose around, are they going to sherlock the parish priest and the town bughunter? We haven't got any interest in Mr. Inglesby's private correspondence, have we? Suppose Miss Eustis's letters are returned to her, what does that prove? Why, nothing at all,—except that it wasn't her correspondence the fellows that cracked that safe were after. We should worry!

"Say, though, don't you wish you could see them when they stroll down to those beautiful offices and go for to open that nice burglar-proof safe with the little brass flower-pot on top of it? What a joke! Holy whiskered black cats, what a joke!"

"I'm afraid Mr. Inglesby's sense of humor isn't his strong point," said I. "Not that I have any sympathy for him. I think he is getting only what he deserves."

"Alexander the coppersmith wrought me much evil. May God requite him according to his works!" murmured the Butterfly Man, piously, and chuckled. "Don't worry, parson—Alexander's due to fall sick with the pip to-day or to-morrow. What do you bet he don't get it so bad he'll have to pull up all his pretty plans by the roots, leave Mr. Hunter in charge, and go off somewhere to take mudbaths for his liver? Believe me, he'll need them! Why, the man won't be able to breathe easy any more—he'll be expecting one in the solar plexus any minute, not knowing any more than Adam's cat who's to hand it to him. He can't tell who to trust and who to suspect. If you want to know just how hard Alexander's going to be requited according to his works, take a look at these." He pointed to the letters.

I did take a look, and I admit I was frightened. It seemed to me highly unsafe for plain folks like us to know such things about such people. I was amazed to the point of stupefaction at the corruption those communications betrayed, the shameless and sordid disregard of law and decency, the brutal and cynical indifference to public welfare. At sight of some of the signatures my head swam—I felt saddened, disillusioned, almost in despair for humanity. I suppose Inglesby had thought it wiser to preserve these letters—possibly for his own safety; but no wonder he had locked them up! I looked at the Butterfly Man openmouthed.

"You wouldn't think folks wearing such names could be that rotten, would you? Some of them pillars of the church, too, and married to good women, and the fathers of nice kids! Why, I have known crooks that the police of a dozen states were after, that wouldn't have been caught dead on jobs like some of these. Inglesby won't know it, but he ought to thank his stars we've got his letters instead of the State Attorney, for I shan't use them unless I have to.... Parson, you remember a bluejay breaking up a nest on me once, and what Laurence said when I wanted to wring the little crook's neck? That the thing isn't to reform the jay but to keep him from doing it again? That's the cue."

He gathered up the scattered letters, made a neat package of them, and put it in a table drawer behind a stack of note-books. And then he reached over and touched the other package, the letters written in Mary Virginia's girlish hand.

"Here's her happiness—long, long years of it ahead of her," he said soberly. "As for you, you take back those tools, and go say mass."

Outside it was broad bright day, a new beautiful day, and the breath of the morning blew sweetly over the world. The Church was full of a clear and early light, the young pale gold of the new Spring sun. None of the congregation had as yet arrived. Before I went into the sacristy to put on my vestments, I gave back into St. Stanislaus' hands the IOU of Slippy McGee.



CHAPTER XX

BETWEEN A BUTTERFLY'S WINGS

There was a glamour upon it. One knew it was going to grow into one of those wonderful and shining days in whose enchanted hours any exquisite miracle might happen. I am perfectly sure that the Lord God walked in the garden in the cool of an April day, and that it was a morning in spring when the angels visited Abraham, sitting watchful in the door of his tent.

There was in the air itself something long-missed and come back, a heady and heart-moving delight, a promise, a thrill, a whisper of "April! April!" that the Green Things and the hosts of the Little People had heard overnight. In the dark the sleeping souls of the golden butterflies had dreamed it, known it was a true Word, and now they were out, "Little flames of God" dancing in the Sunday sunlight. The Red Gulf Fritillary had heard it, and here she was, all in her fine fulvous frock besmocked with black velvet, and her farthingale spangled with silver. And the gallant Red Admiral, the brave beautiful Red Admiral that had dared unfriendlier gales, trimmed his painted sails to a wind that was the breath of spring.

Over by the gate the spirea had ventured into showering sprays exhaling a shy and fugitive fragrance, and what had been a blur of gray cables strung upon the oaks had begun to bud with emerald and blossom with amethyst—the wisteria was a-borning. And one knew there was Cherokee rose to follow, that the dogwood was in white, and the year's new mintage of gold dandelions was being coined in the fresh grass.

There wasn't a bird that wasn't caroling April! at the top of his voice from the full of his heart; for wasn't the world alive again, wasn't it love-time and nest-time, wasn't it Spring?

Even to the tired faces of my work-folks that shining morning lent a light that was hope. Without knowing it, they felt themselves a vital part of the reborn world, sharers in its joy because they were the children of the common lot, the common people for whom the world is, and without whom no world could be. Classes, creeds, nations, gods, all these pass and are gone; God, and the common people, and the spring remain.

When I was young I liked as well as another to dwell overmuch upon the sinfulness of sin, the sorrow of sorrow, the despair of death. Now that these three terrible teachers have taught me a truer wisdom and a larger faith, I like better to turn to the glory of hope, the wisdom of love, and the simple truth that death is just a passing phase of life. So I sent my workers home that morning rejoicing with the truth, and was all the happier and hopefuller myself because of it.

Afterwards, when Clelie was giving me my coffee and rolls, the Butterfly Man came in to breakfast with me, a huge roll of those New York newspapers which contain what are mistakenly known as Comic Supplements tucked under his arm.

He said he bought them because they "tasted like New York" which they do not. Just as Major Cartwright explains his purchase of them by the shameless assertion that it just tickles him to death "to see what Godforsaken idjits those Yankees can make of themselves when they half-way try. Why, suh, one glance at their Sunday newspapers ought to prove to any right thinkin' man that it's safer an' saner to die in South Carolina than to live in New York!"

I think the Butterfly Man and Major Cartwright buy those papers because they think they are funny! After they have read and sniggered, they donate them to Clelie and Daddy January. And presently Clelie distributes them to a waiting colored countryside, which wallpapers its houses with them. I have had to counsel the erring and bolster the faith of the backsliding under the goggle eyes of inhuman creations whose unholy capers have made futile many a prayer. And yet the Butterfly Man likes them! Is it not to wonder?

He laid them tenderly upon the table now, and smiled slyly to see me eye them askance.

"Did you know," said he, over his coffee, "that Laurence came in this morning on the six-o'clock? January had him out in the garden showing off the judge's new patent hives, and I stopped on my way to church and shook hands over the fence. It was all I could do to keep from shouting that all's right with the world, and all he had to do was to be glad. I didn't know how much I cared for that boy until this morning. Parson, it's a—a terrible thing to love people, when you come to think about it, isn't it? I told him you were honing to see him: and that we'd be looking for him along about eleven. And I intimated that if he didn't show up then I'd go after him with a gun. He said he'd be here on the stroke." After a moment, he added gently: "I figured they'd be here by then—Madame and Mary Virginia."

"What! You have induced Laurence to come while she is here—without giving him any intimation that he is likely to meet her?" I said, aghast. "You are a bold man, John Flint!"

The study windows were open and the sweet wind and the warm sun poured in unchecked. The stir of bees, the scent of honey-locust just opening, drifted in, and the slow solemn clangor of church bells, and lilts and flutings and calls and whistlings from the tree-tops. We could see passing groups of our neighbors, fathers and mothers shepherding little flocks of children in their Sunday best, trotting along with demure Sabbath faces on their way to church. The Butterfly Man looked out, waved gaily to the passing children, who waved back a joyous response, nodded to their smiling parents, followed the flight of a tanager's sober spouse, and sniffed the air luxuriously.

"Oh, somebody's got to stage-manage, parson," he said at last, lightly enough, but with a hint of tiredness in his eyes. "And then vanish behind the scenes, leaving the hero and heroine in the middle of the spotlight, with the orchestra tuning up 'The Voice that Breathed o'er Eden,'" he finished, without a trace of bitterness. "So I sent Madame a note by a little nigger newsie." His eyes crinkled, and he quoted the favorite aphorism of the colored people, when they seem to exercise a meticulous care: "Brer Rabbit say, 'I trus' no mistake.'"

"You are a bold man," said I again, with a respect that made him laugh. Then we went over to his rooms to wait, and while we waited I tried to read a chapter of a book I was anxious to finish, but couldn't, my eyes being tempted by the greener and fresher page opening before them. Flint smoked a virulent pipe and read his papers.

Presently he laid his finger upon a paragraph and handed me the paper.... And I read where one "Spike" Frazer had been shot to death in a hand-to-hand fight with the police who were raiding a dive suspected of being the rendezvous of drug-fiends. Long wanted and at last cornered, Frazer had fought tigerishly and died in his tracks, preferring death to capture. A sly and secretive creature, he had had a checkered career in the depths. It was his one boast that more than anybody else he had known and been a sort of protege of the once notorious Slippy McGee, that King of Crooks whose body had been found in the East River some years since, and whose daring and mysterious exploits were not yet altogether forgotten by the police or the underworld.

"Sic transit gloria mundi!" said the Butterfly Man in his gentle voice, and looked out over the peaceful garden and the Sunday calm with inscrutable eyes. I returned the paper with a hand that shook. It seemed to me that a deep and solemn hush fell for a moment upon the glory of the day, while the specter of what might have been gibbered at us for the last time.

Out of the heart of that hush walked two women—one little and rosy and white-haired, one tall and pale and beautiful with the beauty upon which sorrow has placed its haunting imprint. Her black hair framed her face as in ebony, and her blue, blue eyes were shadowed. By an odd coincidence she was dressed this morning just as she had been when the Butterfly Man first saw her—in white, and over it a scarlet jacket. Kerry and little Pitache rose, met them at the gate, and escorted them with grave politeness. The Butterfly Man hastily emptied his pipe and laid aside his newspapers.

"Your note said we were to come, that everything was all right," said my mother, looking up at him with bright and trustful eyes. "Such a relief! Because I know you never say anything you don't mean, John."

He smiled, and with a wave of the hand beckoned us into the workroom. Madame followed him eagerly and expectantly—she knew her John Flint. Mary Virginia came listlessly, dragging her feet, her eyes somber in a smileless face. She could not so quickly make herself hope, she who had journeyed so far into the arid country of despair. But he, with something tender and proud and joyful in his looks, took her unresisting hand and drew her forward.

"Mary Virginia!" I had not known how rich and deep the Butterfly Man's voice could be. "Mary Virginia, we promised you last night that if you would trust us, the Padre and me, we'd find the right way out, didn't we? Now this is what happened: the Padre took his troubles to the Lord, and the Lord presently sent him back to me—with the beginning of the answer in his hand! And here's the whole answer, Mary Virginia." And he placed in her hand the package of letters that meant so much to her.

My mother gave a little scream. "Armand!" she said, fearfully. "She has told me all. Mon Dieu, how have you two managed this, between midnight and morning? My son, you are a De Rance: look me in the eyes and tell me there is nothing wrong, that there will be no ill consequences—"

"There won't be any comebacks," said John Flint, with engaging confidence. "As for you, Mary Virginia, you don't have to worry for one minute about what those fellows can do—because they can't do anything. They're double-crossed. Now listen: when you see Hunter, you are to say to him, 'Thank you for returning my letters.' Just that and no more. If there's any questioning, stare. Stare hard. If there's any threatening about your father, smile. You can afford to smile. They can't touch him. But how those letters came into your hands you are never to tell, you understand? They did come and that's all that interests you." He began to laugh, softly. "All Hunter will want to know is that you've received them. He's too game not to lose without noise, and he'll make Inglesby swallow his dose without squealing, too. So—you're finished and done with Mr. Hunter and Mr. Inglesby!" His voice deepened again, as he added gently: "It was just a bad dream, dear girl. It's gone with the night. Now it's morning, and you're awake."

But Mary Virginia, white as wax, stared at the letters in her hand, and then at me, and trembled.

"Trust us, my child," said I, somewhat troubled. "And obey John Flint implicitly. Do just what he tells you to do, say just what he tells you to say."

Mary Virginia looked from one to the other, thrust the package upon me, walked swiftly up to him, and, laying her hands upon his arms stared with passionate earnestness into his face: the kind, wise, lovable face that every child in Appleboro County adores, every woman trusts, every man respects. Her eyes clung to his, and he met that searching gaze without faltering, though it seemed to probe for the root of his soul. It was well for Mary Virginia that those brave eyes had caught something from the great faces that hung upon his walls and kept company and counsel with him day and night, they that conquered life and death and turned defeat into victory because they had first conquered themselves!

"Yes!" said she, with a deep sigh of relief. "I trust you! Thank God for just how much I can believe and trust you!"

I think that meeting face to face that luminous and unfaltering regard, Mary Virginia must have divined that which had heretofore been hidden from her by the man's invincible modesty and reserve; and being most generous and of a large and loving soul herself, I think she realized to the uttermost the magnitude of his gift. Her name, her secure position, her happiness, the hopes that the coming years were to transform into realities—oh, I like to think that Mary Virginia saw all this, in one of those lightning-flashes of spiritual insight that reveal more than all one's slower years; I like to think she saw it given her freely, nobly, with joy, a glorious love-gift from the limping man into whose empty hand she had one day put a little gray underwing!

I glanced at my mother, and saw by her most expressive face that she knew and understood. She had known and understood, long before any of us.

"If I might offer a suggestion," I said in as matter-of-fact a voice as I could command, "it would be, that the sooner those letters are destroyed, the better."

Mary Virginia took them from me and dropped them on the coals remaining from last night's fire—the last fire of the season. They did not ignite quickly, though they began to turn brown, and thin spirals of smoke arose from them. The Butterfly Man knelt, thrust a handful of lightwood splinters under the pile, and touched a match here and there. When the resinous wood flared up, the letters blazed with it. They blazed and then they crumbled; they disappeared in bits of charred and black paper that vanished at a touch; they were gone while we watched, the girl kneeling upon the hearthrug with her hand on Flint's arm, and I with my old heart singing like a skylark in my breast, and my mother's mild eyes upon us all.

Life and color and beauty flowed back into Mary Virginia's face and music's self sang again in her voice. She was like the day itself, reborn out of a dark last night. When the last bit of blackened paper went swirling up the chimney, and the two of them had risen, the most beautiful and expressive eyes under heaven looked up like blue and dewy flowers into the Butterfly Man's face. She was too wise and too tender to try to thank him in words, and never while they two lived would this be again referred to so much as once by either; but she took his hand, palm upward, gave him one deep long upward glance, and then bent her beautiful head and dropped into the center of his palm a kiss, and closed the fingers gently over it for everlasting keeping and remembrance. The eyes brimmed over then, and two large tears fell upon his hand and washed her kiss in, indelibly.

None of us four had the power of speech left us. Heaven knows what we should have done, if Laurence hadn't opened the door at that moment and walked in upon us. I don't think he altogether sensed the tenseness of the situation which his coming relieved, but he went pale at sight of Mary Virginia, and he would have left incontinently if my mother, with a joyous shriek, hadn't pounced upon him.

"Laurence! Why, Laurence! But we didn't expect you home until to-morrow night!" said she, kissing him motherly. "My dear, dear boy, how glad I am to see you! What happy wind blew you home to-day, Laurence?"

"Oh, I finished my work ahead of schedule and got away just as soon as I could," Laurence briefly and modestly explained thus that he had won his case. He edged toward the door, avoiding Mary Virginia's eyes. He had bowed to her with formal politeness. He wondered at the usually tactful Madame's open effort to detain him. It was a little too much to expect of him!

"I just ran in to see how you all were," he tried to be very casual. "See you later, Padre. 'By, p'tite Madame. 'By, Flint." He bowed again to Mary Virginia, whose color had altogether left her, and who stood there most palpably nervous and distressed.

"Laurence!" The Butterfly Man spoke abruptly. "Laurence, if a chap was dying of thirst and the water of life was offered him, he'd be considerable of a fool to turn his head aside and refuse to see it, wouldn't he?"

Laurence paused. Something in the Butterfly Man's face, something in mine and Madame's, but, above all, something in Mary Virginia's, arrested him. He stood wavering, and my mother released his arm.

"I take it," said John Flint, boldly plunging to the very heart of the matter, "I take it, Laurence, that you still care a very great deal for this dear girl of ours?" And now he had taken her hand in his and held it comfortingly. "More, say, than you could ever care for anybody else, if you lived to rival Methusaleh? So much, Laurence, that not to be able to believe she cares the same way for you takes the core out of life?" His manner was simple and direct, and so kind that one could only answer him in a like spirit. Besides, Laurence loved the Butterfly Man even as Jonathan loved David.

"Yes," said the boy honestly, "I still care for her—like that. I always did. I always will. She knows." But his voice was toneless.

"Of course you do, kid brother," said Flint affectionately. "Don't you suppose I know? But it's just as well for you to say it out loud every now and then. Fresh air is good for everything, particularly feelings. Keeps 'em fresh and healthy. Now, Mary Virginia, you feel just the same way about Laurence, don't you?" And he added: "Don't be ashamed to tell the most beautiful truth in the world, my dear. Well?"

She went red and white. She looked entreatingly into the Butterfly Man's face. She didn't exactly see why he should drive her thus, but she caught courage from his. One saw how wise Flint had been to have snared Laurence here just now. One moment she hesitated. Then:

"Yes!" said she, and her head went up proudly. "Yes, oh, yes, I care—like that. Only much, much more! I shall always care like that, although he probably won't believe me now when I say so. And I can't blame him for doubting me."

"But it just happens that I have never been able to make myself doubt you," said Laurence gravely. "Why, Mary Virginia, you are you."

"Then, Laurence," said the Butterfly Man, quickly, "will you take your old friends' word for it—mine, Madame's, the Padre's—that you were most divinely right to go on believing in her and loving her, because she never for one moment ceased to be worthy of faith and affection? No, not for one moment! She couldn't, you know. She's Mary Virginia! And will you promise to listen with all your patience to what she may think best to tell you presently—and then forget it? You're big enough to do that! She's been in sore straits, and she needs all the love you have, to help make up to her. Can she be sure of it, Laurence?"

Laurence flushed. He looked at his old friend with reproach in his fine brown eyes. "You have known me all my life, all of you," said he, stiffly. "Have I ever given any of you any reason to doubt me!"

"No, and we don't. Not one of us. But it's good for your soul to say things out loud," said Flint comfortably. "And now you've said it, don't you think you two had better go on over to the Parish House parlor, which is a nice quiet place, and talk this whole business over and out—together?"

Laurence looked at Mary Virginia and what he saw electrified him. Boyishness flooded him, youth danced in his eyes, beauty was upon him, like sunlight.

"Mary Virginia!" said the boy lover to the girl sweetheart, "is it really so? I was really right to believe all along that you—care?"

"Laurence, Laurence!" she was half-crying. "Oh, Laurence, are you sure you care—yet? You are sure, Laurence? You are sure? Because—I—I don't think I could stand things now if—if I were mistaken—"

I don't know whether the boy ran to the girl at that, or the girl to the boy. I rather think they ran to each other because, in another moment, perfectly regardless of us, they were clinging to each other, and my mother was walking around them and crying heartily and shamelessly, and enjoying herself immensely. Mary Virginia began to stammer:

"Laurence, if you only knew—Laurence, if it wasn't for John Flint—and the Padre—" The two of them had the two of us, each by an arm; and the Butterfly Man was brick-red and furiously embarrassed, he having a holy horror of being held up and thanked.

"Why, I did what I did," said he, uncomfortably. "But,"—he brightened visibly—"if you will have the truth, have it. If it wasn't for this blessed brick of a parson I'd never have been in a position to do anything for anybody. Don't you forget that!"

"What ridiculous nonsense the man talks!" said I, exasperated by this shameless casuistry. "John Flint raves. As for me—"

"As for you," said he with deep reproach, "you ought to know better than to tell such a thumping lie at this time of your life. I'm ashamed of you, parson! Why, you know good and well—"

"Why, John Flint, you—" I began, aghast.

My mother began to laugh. "For heaven's sake, thank them both and have done with it!" said she, a bit hysterically. "God alone knows how they managed, but this thing lies between them, the two great geese. Did one ever hear the like?"

"Madame is right, as always," said Laurence gravely. "Remember, I don't know anything yet, except that somehow you've brought Mary Virginia and me back to each other. That's enough for me. I haven't got any questions to ask." His voice faltered, and he gripped us by the hand in turn, with a force that made me, for one, wince and cringe. "And Padre—Bughunter, you both know that I—" he couldn't finish.

"That we—" choked Mary Virginia.

"Sure we know," said the Butterfly Man hastily. "Don't you know you're our kids and we've got to know?" He began to edge them towards the door. I think his courage was getting a little raw about the corners. "Yes, you two go on over to the Parish House parlor, where you'll have a chance to talk without being interrupted—Madame will see to that—and don't you show your noses outside of that room until everything's settled the one and only way everything ought to be settled." His eyes twinkled as he manoeuvered them outside, and then stood in the doorway to watch them walk away—beautiful, youthful, radiantly happy, and very close together, the girl's head just on the level of the boy's shoulder. He was still faintly smiling when he came back to us; if there was pain behind that smile, he concealed it. My mother ran to him, impulsively.

"John Flint!" said she, profoundly moved and earnest. "John Flint, the good God never gave me but one child, though I prayed for more. Often and often have I envied her silly mother Mary Virginia. But now. John, I know that if I could have had another child that, after Armand, I'd love best and respect most and be proudest of in this world, it would be you. Yes, you. John Flint, you are the best man, and the bravest and truest and most unselfish, and the finest gentleman, outside of my husband and my son, that I have ever known. What makes it all the more wonderful is that you're a genius along with it. I am proud of you, and glad of you, and I admire and love you with all my heart. And I really wish you'd call me mother. You should have been born a De Rance!"

This, from my mother! I was amazed. Why, she would think she was flattering one of the seraphim if she had said to him, "You might have been a De Rance!"

"Madame!" stammered Flint, "why, Madame!"

"Oh, well, never mind, then. Let it go at Madame, since it would embarrass you to change. But I look upon you as my son, none the less. I claim you from this hour," said she firmly, as one not to be gainsaid.

"I'm beginning to believe in fairy-stories," said Flint. "The beggar comes home—and he isn't a beggar at all, he's a Prince. Because the Queen is his mother."

My mother looked at him approvingly. The grace of his manner, and the unaffected feeling of his words, pleased her. But she said no more of what was in her heart for him. She fell back, as women do, upon the safe subject of housekeeping matters.

"I suppose," she mused, "that those children will remain with us to-day? Yes, of course. Armand, we shall have the last of your great-grandfather's wine. And I am going to send over for the judge. Let me see: shall I have time for a cake with frosting? H'm! Yes, I think so. Or would you prefer wine jelly with whipped cream, John?"

He considered gravely, one hand on his hip, the other stroking his beard.

"Couldn't we have both!" he wondered hopefully. "Please! Just for this once?"

"We could! We shall!" said my mother, grandly, recklessly, extravagantly. "Adieu, then, children of my heart! I go to confer with Clelie." She waved her hand and was gone.

The place shimmered with sun. Old Kerry lay with his head between his paws and dozed and dreamed in it, every now and then opening his hazel eyes to make sure that all was well with his man. All outdoors was one glory of renewing life, of stir and growth, of loving and singing and nest-building, and the budding of new green leaves and the blossoming of April boughs. Just such April hopes were theirs who had found each other again this morning. All of life at its best and fairest stretched sunnily before those two, the fairer for the cloud that had for a time darkened it, the dearer and diviner for the loss that had been so imminent.

... That was a redbird again. And now a vireo. And this the mockingbird, love-drunk, emptying his heart of a troubadour in a song of fire and dew. And on a vagrant air, a gipsy air, the scent of the honey-locust. The spring for all the world else. But for him I loved,—what?

I suppose my wistful eyes betrayed me, for used to the changing expressions of my thin visage, he smiled; and stood up, stretching his arms above his head. He drew in great mouthfuls of the sweet air, and expanded his broad chest.

"I feel full to the brim!" said he gloriously. "I've got almost too much to hold with both hands! Parson, parson, it isn't possible you're fretting over me? Sorry for me? Why, man, consider!"

Ah, but had I not considered? I knew, I thought, what he had to hold fast to. Honor, yes. And the friendship of some and the admiration of many and the true love of the few, which is all any man may hope for and more than most attain. Outside of that, a gray moth, and a butterfly's wing, and a torn nest, and a child's curl, and a ragdoll in her grave; and now a girl's kiss on the palm and a tear to hallow it. But I who had greatly loved and even more greatly lost and suffered, was it not for me of all men to know and to understand?

"But I have got the thing itself," said the Butterfly Man, "that makes everything else worth while. Why, I have been taught how to love! My work is big—but by itself it wasn't enough for me. I needed something more. So I was swept and empty and ready and waiting—when she came. Now hadn't there got to be something fine and decent in me, when it was she alone out of all the world I was waiting for and could love?"

"Yes, yes. But oh, my son, my son!"

"Oh, it was bad and bitter enough at first, parson. Because I wanted her so much! Great God, I was like a soul in hell! After awhile I crawled out of hell—on my hands and knees. But I'd begun to understand things. I'd been taught. It'd been burnt into me past forgetting. Maybe that's what hell is for, if folks only knew it. Could anything ever happen to anybody any more that I couldn't understand and be sorry for, I wonder?

"No, don't you worry any about me. I wouldn't change places with anybody alive, I'm too glad for everything that's ever happened to me, good and bad. I'm not ashamed of the beginning, no, nor I'm not afraid of the end.

"Will you believe me, though, when I tell you what worried me like the mischief for awhile? Family, parson! You can't live in South Carolina without having the seven-years' Family-itch wished on you, you know. I felt like a mushroom standing up on my one leg all by myself among a lot of proper garden plants—until I got fed up on the professional Descendant banking on his boneyard full of dead ones; then I quit worrying. I'm Me and alive—and I should worry about ancestors! Come to think about it, everybody's an ancestor while you wait. I made up my mind I'd be my own ancestor and my own descendant—and make a good job of both while I was at it."

But I was too sad to smile. And after awhile he asked gently:

"Are you grieving because you think I've lost love? Parson, did you ever know something you didn't know how you knew, but you know you know it because it's true? Well then—I know that girl's mine and I came here to find her, though on the face of it you'd think I'd lost her, wouldn't you? Somewhere and sometime I'll come again—and when I do, she'll know me."

And to save my life I couldn't tell him I didn't believe it! His manner even more than his words impressed me. He didn't look improbable.

"One little life and one little death," said the Butterfly Man, "couldn't possibly be big enough for something like this to get away from a man forever. I have got the thing too big for a dozen lives to hold. Isn't that a great deal for a man to have, parson?"

"Yes." said I. "It is a great deal for a man to have." But I foresaw the empty, empty places, in the long, long years ahead. I added faintly: "Having that much, you have more than most."

"You only have what you are big enough not to take," said he. "And I'm not fooling myself I shan't be lonesome and come some rough tumbles at times. The difference is, that if I go down now I won't stay down. If there was one thing I could grieve over, too, it would be—kids. I'd like kids. My own kids. And I shall never have any. It—well, it just wouldn't be fair to the kids. Louisa'll come nearest to being mine by bornation—though I'm thinking she's managed to wish me everybody else's, on her curl."

"So! You are your own ancestor and your own descendant, and everybody's kids are yours! You are modest, hein? And what else have you got?"

His eyes suddenly danced. "Nothing but the rest of the United States," said the Butterfly Man, magnificently. And when I stared, he laughed at me.

"It's quite true, parson: I have got the whole United States to work for. Uncle Sam. U.S. Us! I've been drafted into the Brigade that hasn't any commander, nor any colors, nor honors, nor even a name; but that's never going to be mustered out of service, because we that enlist and belong can't and won't quit.

"Parson, think of me representing the Brigade down here on the Carolina coast, keeping up the work, fighting things that hurt and finding out things that help Lord, what a chance! A hundred millions to work for, a hundred millions of one's own people—and a trail to blaze for the unborn millions to come!" His glance kindled, his face was like a lighted lamp. The vision was upon him, standing there in the April sunlight, staring wide-eyed into the future.

Its reflected light illumined me, too—a little. And I saw that in a very large and splendid sense, this was the true American. He stood almost symbolically for that for which America stands—the fighting chance to overcome and to grow, the square deal, the spirit that looks eagle-eyed and unafraid into the sunrise. And above all for unselfish service and unshakable faith, and a love larger than personal love, prouder than personal pride, higher than personal ambition. They do not know America who do not know and will not see this spirit in her, going its noble and noiseless way apart.

"The whole world to work for, and a whole lifetime to do it in!" said the voice of America, exultant. "Lord God, that's a man-sized job, but You just give me hands and eyes and time, and I'll do the best I can. You've done Your part by me—stand by, and I'll do mine by You!"

Are those curious coincidences, those circumstances which occur at such opportune moments that they leave one with a sense of a guiding finger behind the affairs of men—are they, after all, only fortuitous accidents, or have they a deeper and a diviner significance?

There stood the long worktable, with orderly piles of work on it; the microscope in its place; the books he had opened and pushed aside last night; and some half-dozen small card-board boxes in a row, containing the chrysalids he had been experimenting with, trying the effect of cold upon color. The cover of one box had been partially pushed off, possibly when he had moved the books. And while we had been paying attention to other things, one of these chrysalids had been paying strict attention to its own business, the beautiful and important business of becoming a butterfly. Flint discovered it first, and gave a pleased exclamation.

"Look! Look! A Turnus, father! The first Turnus of the year!"

The insect had been out for an hour or two, but was not yet quite ready to fly. It had crawled out of the half-opened box, dragged its wormy length across the table, over intervening obstacles, seeking some place to climb up and cling to.

Now the Butterfly Man had left the Bible open, merely shoving it aside without shutting it, when he had found no comfort for himself last night in what John had to say. Protected by piled-up books and propped almost upright by the large inkstand, it gave the holding-place the insect desired. The butterfly had walked up the page and now clung to the top.

There she rested, her black-and-yellow body quivering like a tiny live dynamo from the strong force of circulation, that was sending vital fluids upward into the wings to give them power and expansion. We had seen the same thing a thousand and one times before, we should see it a thousand and one times again. But I do not think either of us could ever forego the delight of watching a butterfly's wings shaping themselves for flight, and growing into something of beauty and of wonder. The lovely miracle is ever new to us.

She was a big butterfly, big even for the greatest of Carolina swallow-tails; not the dark dimorphic form, but the true Tiger Turnus itself, her barred yellow upper wings edged with black enamel indented with red gold, her tailed lower wings bordered with a wider band of black, and this not only set with lunettes of gold but with purple amethysts, and a ruby on the upper and lower edges. Her wings moved rhythmically; a constant quivering agitated her, and her antennae with their flattened clubs seemed to be sending and receiving wireless messages from the shining world outside.

And as the wings had dried and grown firmer in the mild warm current of air and the bright sunlight, she moved them with a wider and bolder sweep. The heavy, unwieldy body, thinned by the expulsion of those currents driven upward to give flying-power to the wings, had taken on a slim and tapering grace. She had reached her fairy perfection. She was ready now for flight and light and love and freedom and the uncharted pathways of the air, ready to carry out the design of the Creator who had fashioned her so wondrously and so beautiful, and had sent ahead of her the flowers for that marvelous tongue of hers to sip.

Waiting still, opening and closing her exquisite wings, trying them, spreading them flat, the splendid swallow-tail clung to the page of the book open at the Gospel of John. And I, idly enough, leaned forward, and saw between the opening and the closing wings, words. The which John Flint, bending forward beside me, likewise saw. "Work," flashed out. And on a lower line, "while it is day."

I grasped the edge of the table; his knuckles showed white beside mine.

"I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day."

His eyes grew larger and deeper. A sort of inward light, a serene and joyous acceptance and assurance, flowed into them. I that had dared to be despondent felt a sense of awe. The Voice that had once spoken above the Mercy Seat and between the wings of the cherubim was speaking now in immortal words between, the wings of a butterfly.

She was poising herself for her first flight, the bright and lovely Lady of the Sky. Now she spread her wings flat, as a fan is unfurled. And now she had lifted them clear and uncovered her message. The Butterfly Man watched her, hanging absorbed upon her every movement. And he read, softly:

"I must work ... while it is day."

Lightly as a flower, a living and glorious flower, she lifted and launched herself into the air, flew straight and sure for the outside light, hung poised one gracious moment, and was gone.

He turned to me the sweetest, clearest eyes I have ever seen in a mortal countenance, the eyes of a little child. His face had caught a sort of secret beauty, that was never to leave it any more.

"Parson!" said the Butterfly Man, in a whisper that shook with the beating of his heart behind it: "Parson! Don't it beat hell?"

I rocked on my toes. Then I flung my arms around him, with a jubilant shout:

"It does! It does! Oh, Butterfly Man, by the grace and the glory and the wonder of God, it beats hell!"

THE END