Something of this I said to the Butterfly Man, and he nodded, but did not answer.  He fell into a brown study; then plunged from the room without further look or word and made for his own desk.  I was not afraid of what the Butterfly Man, fresh from little Appleboro’s woods and fields, would have to say to the scholars and scientists gathered to hear him!

Apparently he was not either, for after he had gotten a few notes together he wisely turned the whole affair over to that mysterious Self that does our work and solves our problems for us.  On the surface he busied himself with a paper setting forth the many reasons why the County of Appleboro should appropriate adequate funds for a common dipping vat, and hurried this to Dabney, who was holding open a space in the Clarion for it.  Then there were new breeding cages to be made, for the supply of eggs and cocoons on hand would require additional quarters, once they began to emerge.

By the Saturday he had finished all this; and as I had that afternoon free we spent some beautiful hours with the microscope and slide mounts.  I completed, too, the long delayed drawings of some diurnal wasp-moths and their larvae.  We worked until my mother interrupted us with a summons to an early dinner, for Saturday evening belongs to the confessional and I was shortly due at the church.

I left Flint with Madame and Miss Sally Ruth, who had run over after the neighborly Appleboro wont with a plate of fresh sponge-cake and a bowl of fragrant custard.  Miss Sally Ruth is nothing if not generous, but there are times when one could wish upon her the affliction of dumbness.  As I slipped into my cassock in the study, I could hear her uplifted voice, a voice so insistent and so penetrating that it can pierce closed doors and come through a ceiling: 

“I declare to goodness, I don’t know what to believe any more!  She’s got money enough in her own right, hasn’t she?  For heaven’s sake, then, why should she marry for more money?  But you never really know people, do you?  Why, folks say—­”

I hurried out of the house and ran the short distance to the church.  I wished I hadn’t heard; I wished Miss Sally Ruth, good as she is, would sometimes hold her tongue.  She will set folks by the ears in heaven some of these days if she doesn’t mend her ways before she gets there.

It must have been all of ten o’clock when I got back to the Parish House.  Madame had retired; John Flint’s rooms were dark.  The night itself was dark, though in between the clouds that a brisk wind pulleyhauled about the skies, one saw many stars.

Too tired to sleep, I sat beside my window and breathed the repose that lay like a benediction upon the little city.  I found myself praying; for Mary Virginia, whom I loved and over whom I was sorely troubled; for Laurence, even now walking such a road as I also once had to travel with feet as young but no more steadfast; and then with a thankfulness too deep for words, I thought a prayer for the Butterfly Man.  So thinking and so praying, with a glow in my heart because of him, I closed my window, and crept into bed and into sleep.