and rather painful. Westmoreland did
what he could, but there was no stamina in that frail body, so her's
had been one of the small hands to fall limp and still out of John
Flint's. The doll he had made for her lay in the crook of her arm; it
had on a red calico dress, very garish in the gray room, and against
the child's whiteness.

Westmoreland stood, big and compassionate, at the foot of the bed. His
ruddy face showed wan and behind his glasses his gray tired eyes
winked and blinked.

"There must be," said the Doctor, as if to himself, "some eternal vast
reservoir somewhere, that stores up all this terrible total of
unnecessary suffering--the cruel and needless suffering inflicted upon
children and animals, in particular. Perhaps it's a spiritual serum
used for the saving of the race. Perhaps races higher up than we use
it--as _we_ use rabbits and guinea-pigs. No, no, nothing's wasted;
there's a forward end to pain, somewhere." He looked down at the child
and shook his head doubtfully:

"But when all is said and done," he muttered, "what do such as these
get out of it? Nothing--so far as we can see. They're victims, they
and the innocent beasts, thrust into a world which tortures and
devours them. Why? Why? Why?"

"There is nothing to do but leave that everlasting Why to God," said
I, painfully.

The Butterfly Man looked up and one saw that cold sword-straight,
diamond-hard something in his eyes:

"Parson," said he, grimly, "you're a million miles off the right
track--and you know it. Leaving things to God--things like poor kids
dying because they're gouged out of their right to live--is just about
as rotten stupid and wrong as it can well be. God's all right; he does
his part of the job. You do yours, and what happens? Why, my
butterflies answer that! I'm punk on your catechism, and if _this_ is
all it can teach I hope I die punk on it; but as near as I can make
out, original sin is leaving things like this"--and he looked at his
small friend with her doll on her arm--"to God, instead of tackling
the job yourself and straightening it out."

The child's mother, a gaunt creature without a trace of youth left in
her, although she could not have been much more than thirty, shambled
over to a chair on the other side of the bed. She wore a faded red
calico wrapper--a scrap of it had made the doll's frock--and a
blue-checked apron with holes in it. Her hair was drawn painfully back
from her forehead, and there wa