d 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