The room bobbed up and down.  But she didn’t faint, she didn’t scream.  She caught hold of the mantel to steady herself.  She wondered how she hadn’t known; she had the same sense of wild amazement that must fill one who has been brought face to face with a stupendous, a quite impossible miracle.  Such a thing couldn’t happen:  and yet it is so!  And oddly enough, out of this welter of her thoughts, there came to her memory a screened bed in a hospital ward, and a dying gutter-girl looking at her with unearthly eyes and telling her in a thin whisper: 

“I wanted to see if you was good enough for him.  You ain’t.  But remember what I’m tellin’ you—­you could be.”

Pierre—­Peter Champneys!  She slipped to her knees and hid her face in her shaking hands.  Peter Champneys!  As in a lightning flash she saw him as that girl Gracie had seen him.  Pierre—­Pierre, with his eyes of an archangel, his lips that were the chrism of life—­this was Peter Champneys!  And she had hated him, let him go, all unknowing, she had wished to put in his place Berkeley Hayden.  The handsome, worldly figure of Hayden seemed to dwindle and shrink.  Pierre stood as on a height, looking at her steadfastly.  Her head went lower.  Tears trickled between her fingers.

You ain’t good enough for him, but you could be.

“I can be, I can be!  Oh, God, I can be!  Only let him love me—­when he knows!”

She heard Mrs. Thatcher’s voice downstairs, after a while.  Then a deeper voice, a man’s voice, with a note of impatience and eagerness in it.

“No, don’t call her.  I’ll go right on up,” said the voice, over the feminine apologies and protests.  “I have to see her—­I must see her now.  No, I can’t wait.”

Somebody came flying up the steps.  She hadn’t closed her door, and his tall figure seemed to fill it.  He stopped, with a gasp, at sight of the weeping woman kneeling before the picture on the mantel.

“Anne!” he cried.  “Anne!” And he would have raised her, but she clung to his knees, lifting her tear-stained face, her eyes full of an adoration that would never leave them until life left them.

“Peter!” she cried.  “Peter!  That—­that butterfly!  I know now, Peter!”

Again he tried to raise her, but she clasped his knees all the closer.

“You mean you know my name is really Peter Champneys, dearest?”

But she caught his hands.  “Peter, Peter, don’t you understand?” she cried, laughing and weeping.  “I—­I’m the ogress!  I’m Nancy Simms!  I’m Anne Champneys!”

He looked from her to her portrait and back again.  He gave a great ringing cry of, “My wife!” and lifted her in a mighty grip that swept her up and into his arms.  “My wife!” he cried.  “My wife!”

Undoubtedly the Red Admiral was a fairy!

* * * * *