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

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

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

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

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

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