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!”