spects. Her eyes clung to his, and he met that
searching gaze without faltering, though it seemed to probe for the
root of his soul. It was well for Mary Virginia that those brave eyes
had caught something from the great faces that hung upon his walls and
kept company and counsel with him day and night, they that conquered
life and death and turned defeat into victory because they had first
conquered themselves!

"Yes!" said she, with a deep sigh of relief. "I trust you! Thank God
for just how much I can believe and trust you!"

I think that meeting face to face that luminous and unfaltering
regard, Mary Virginia must have divined that which had heretofore been
hidden from her by the man's invincible modesty and reserve; and being
most generous and of a large and loving soul herself, I think she
realized to the uttermost the magnitude of his gift. Her name, her
secure position, her happiness, the hopes that the coming years were
to transform into realities--oh, I like to think that Mary Virginia
saw all this, in one of those lightning-flashes of spiritual insight
that reveal more than all one's slower years; I like to think she saw
it given her freely, nobly, with joy, a glorious love-gift from the
limping man into whose empty hand she had one day put a little gray
underwing!

I glanced at my mother, and saw by her most expressive face that she
knew and understood. She had known and understood, long before any of
us.

"If I might offer a suggestion," I said in as matter-of-fact a voice
as I could command, "it would be, that the sooner those letters are
destroyed, the better."

Mary Virginia took them from me and dropped them on the coals
remaining from last night's fire--the last fire of the season. They
did not ignite quickly, though they began to turn brown, and thin
spirals of smoke arose from them. The Butterfly Man knelt, thrust a
handful of lightwood splinters under the pile, and touched a match
here and there. When the resinous wood flared up, the letters blazed
with it. They blazed and then they crumbled; they disappeared in bits
of charred and black paper that vanished at a touch; they were gone
while we watched, the girl kneeling upon the hearthrug with her hand
on Flint's arm, and I with my old heart singing like a skylark in my
breast, and my mother's mild eyes upon us all.

Life and color and beauty flowed back into Mary Virginia's face and
music's self sang again in her voice. She was like the day