ed from the room
without further look or word and made for his own desk. I was not
afraid of what the Butterfly Man, fresh from little Appleboro's woods
and fields, would have to say to the scholars and scientists gathered
to hear him!

Apparently he was not either, for after he had gotten a few notes
together he wisely turned the whole affair over to that mysterious
Self that does our work and solves our problems for us. On the surface
he busied himself with a paper setting forth the many reasons why the
County of Appleboro should appropriate adequate funds for a common
dipping vat, and hurried this to Dabney, who was holding open a space
in the _Clarion_ for it. Then there were new breeding cages to be
made, for the supply of eggs and cocoons on hand would require
additional quarters, once they began to emerge.

By the Saturday he had finished all this; and as I had that afternoon
free we spent some beautiful hours with the microscope and slide
mounts. I completed, too, the long delayed drawings of some diurnal
wasp-moths and their larvae. We worked until my mother interrupted us
with a summons to an early dinner, for Saturday evening belongs to the
confessional and I was shortly due at the church.

I left Flint with Madame and Miss Sally Ruth, who had run over after
the neighborly Appleboro wont with a plate of fresh sponge-cake and a
bowl of fragrant custard. Miss Sally Ruth is nothing if not generous,
but there are times when one could wish upon her the affliction of
dumbness. As I slipped into my cassock in the study, I could hear her
uplifted voice, a voice so insistent and so penetrating that it can
pierce closed doors and come through a ceiling:

"I declare to goodness, I don't know what to believe any more! She's
got money enough in her own right, hasn't she? For heaven's sake,
then, why should she marry for more money? But you never really know
people, do you? Why, folks say--"

I hurried out of the house and ran the short distance to the church. I
wished I hadn't heard; I wished Miss Sally Ruth, good as she is, would
sometimes hold her tongue. She will set folks by the ears in heaven
some of these days if she doesn't mend her ways before she gets there.

It must have been all of ten o'clock when I got back to the Parish
House. Madame had retired; John Flint's rooms were dark. The night
itself was dark, though in between the clouds that a brisk wind
pulleyhauled about the skies, one saw many stars.