The threat happily availed, and the feast went forward, a phantom and duly apologetic Mrs. Sullivan serving us with every delicacy which our imaginations afforded.  When we had eaten to repletion, of and from the checkers which were our plates and food as well, Mrs. Judge Robinson suddenly became Irene, who had eaten too much and had to be scolded and put to bed.  The lights were out, the revelry done.

“Going walking now?” asked my namesake.  He did not know how to behave at tea-parties, and, sitting at a little distance from us, he had been aiming an imaginary gun at every fat robin that mined the lawn for sustenance.

“Ask your father if you may go,” I said.  I had heard Solon pacing his room—­forever cogitating the imminent Potts.  I did not enter the house oftener than I could help, for always in those rooms I felt a troubled presence, a homesick thing that pushed two frail white hands against an intangible but sufficing curtain that held it from those it sickened for.  I could not long be easy there.

It was a day poised and serene, with white brush-dabs of cloud on a wonderful canvas of blue,—­a day when I longed for the honeyed fragrance of the woods warming from the last night’s rain.

But this was not to be my walk.  Not for me the shaded arches of the wood where glad birds piped, nor the velvet hillsides tufted with green and yellow and brown, nor eke the quiet lane running between walls of foliage, where simple rabbits scampered, amazed, but not yet taught their fullest fear.

The butterflies we must chase hovered rather along urban ways.  That of the woman child was social.  Ahead of us she flounced.  Strangely, she was herself Mrs. Judge Robinson now.  I understood that she was decked in a gown of royal purple, whose sweeping velvet train gave her no little trouble.  But she paid her calls.  At each gate she stopped, and it seemed that persons met her there, for she began:—­

“Why, how do you do? Yes, it’s lovely weather we’re having.  Are your children got the scarlet fever?  That’s too bad.  So has mine.  I’m afraid they’ll die.  Well, I must be going now. Good day!”

Sometimes she ran back to say, “Now do come over some day and bring your work!”

The butterflies pursued by my namesake were various, and some of them were more secret.

For one he made me stand with him while he gazed long into the drug-store window.  I divined at last that those giant chalices, one of green and one of ruby liquor, were the objects of his worship.  He could not have told me this, but I knew that in his mind these were compounds of unparalleled richness, potent with Heaven knows what wondrous charms.  It was not that he dreamed ever of securing any of the stuff; the spell endured only while they must stand there, remote, splendid, inaccessible.