ou've
been gone! Now I'm sending one or two of them back to you. Please
play like my tray's a million times bigger and finer and that
it's all loaded down with good messages and hopes; and believe
that still it wouldn't be half big enough to hold all the good
wishes the Parish House folks (you were right: I belong, and so
does Kerry) send you to-day by the hand of your old friend,

THE BUTTERFLY MAN.

Mary Virginia showed me that letter, too, because she was so delighted
with it, and so proud of it. I like its English very well, but I like
its Irishness even better.

But, although she had at last finished and done with school, Mary
Virginia didn't come home to us as we had hoped she would. Her mother
had other plans, which failed to include little Appleboro. Why should
a girl with such connections and opportunities be buried in a little
town when great cities waited for just such with open and welcoming
arms? The best we got then was a photograph of our girl in her
graduation frock--slim wistful Mary Virginia, with much of her dear
angular youthfulness still clinging to her.

It was Mrs. Eustis herself who kept us posted, after awhile, of the
girl's later triumphant progress; the sensation she created, the bored
world bowing to her feet because she brought it, along with name and
wealth, so fresh a spirit, so pure a beauty. There was a certain
autocratic old Aunt of her mother's, a sort of awful high priestess in
the inmost shrine of the sacred elect; this Begum, delighted with her
young kinswoman, ordered the rest of her world to be likewise
delighted, and the world agreeing with her verdict, Mary Virginia
fared very well. She was feted, photographed, and paragraphed. Her
portrait, painted by a rather obscure young man, made the painter
famous. In the hands of the Begum the pretty girl blossomed into a
great beauty. The photograph that presently came to us quite took our
breath away, she was so regal.

"She will never, never again be at home in little Appleboro," said my
mother, regretfully. "That dear, simple, passionate, eager child we
used to know has gone forever--life has taken her. This beautiful
creature's place is not here--_she_ belongs to a world where the women
wear titles and tiaras, and the men wear kings' orders. No, we could
never hope to hold her any more."

"But we could love her, could we not? Perhaps even more than those
fine ladies with tiaras and titles and those fi