and the strain of another winter. She was pleasantly
excited; she knew he had many northern correspondents, with whom he
must naturally be anxious to foregather. There was much to call him
thither.

"He really needs the change. A short trip will do him a world of
good," she concluded equably. "He is still quite a young man, and I'm
sure it must be dull for him here at times, in spite of his work.
Why, he hasn't been out of this county for over three years, and just
think of the unfettered life he must have led before he came here!
Yes, I'm sure New York will stimulate him. A dose of New York is a
very good tonic. It regulates one's mental liver. Don't look so
worried, Armand--you remind me of those hens who hatch ducklings. I
should think a duckling of John Flint's size could be trusted to swim
by himself, at his time of life!"

She had not my cause for fear. Besides, in her secret heart, Madame
was convinced that, rehabilitated, reclaimed, having more than proven
his intrinsic worth, John Flint went to be reconciled with and
received into the bosom of some preeminently proper parent, and to be
acclaimed and applauded by admiring and welcoming friends. For
although she had once heard the Butterfly Man gravely assure Miss
Sally Ruth Dexter that the only ancestor his immediate Flints were
sure of was Flint the pirate, my mother still clung firmly to the
illusion of Family. Blood will tell!

As for me, I was equally sure that blood was telling now; and telling
in the atrocious tongue of the depths. I felt that the end had come.
Vain, vain, all the labor, all the love, all the hope, the prayers,
the pride! The submerged voice of his old life was calling him; the
vampire extended her white and murderous arms in which many and many
had died shamefully; she lifted to his her insatiable lips stained
scarlet with the wine of hell. Against that siren smile, those
beckoning hands, I could do nothing. The very fact that I was what I
am, was no longer a help, but rather a hindrance; he recognized in the
priest a deterring and detaining influence against which he rebelled,
and which he wished to repudiate. He was, as he had said so terribly,
"home-sick for hell." He would go, and he would most inevitably be
caught in the whirlpools; the naturalist, the scientist, the Butterfly
Man, would be sucked into that boiling vortex and drowned beyond all
hope of resuscitation; but from it the soul of Slippy McGee would
emerge, with a large