on to the butterflies, at last."

"Why should you imagine that they have any special significance?"
Hayden's voice sounded faint and dull in his ears.

"Because I have a nose for news, Hayden. I was born with it. I feel news
in the air. I scent it and I'm rarely mistaken. I said to myself last
November, those butterflies mean something, and I intend to get to the
bottom of them. And where do you think they led me? Oh, you will be
interested in this, Hayden," smiling. "They led me right to the root of
Marcia Oldham's secret."

Hayden threw up his head, a flash of anger on his spiritless face. "You
can't discuss Miss Oldham here, Penfield."

"Oh, easy now," returned Horace cynically. "It's nothing to her
discredit, far from it. You remember the night you suggested that she
might live by the sale of her pictures, and I scoffed at you and said
that all the pretty little pictures she could paint in a year wouldn't
keep her in gowns? Well, you were nearer right than I for once."

A light came into Hayden's face. He opened his mouth as if about to speak.

"Now, just wait," Horace admonished him. "The reason your suggestion
struck me as ridiculous was this: One must have a reputation to make a
decent living as an artist, and who ever heard of the Oldham pictures?
Where were they on exhibition? Who bought them? Nothing in it, you see."
He moved his hand with a gesture of finality. "But," impressively,
"Marcia Oldham can paint just the same, and beautifully; but that is not
all she can do. It appears that as a child she very early showed a marked
artistic talent. Her mother always disliked it; though her father
encouraged it in every way; but she developed a rather peculiar bent, and
in the years that she spent abroad she devoted herself to the designing
and making of jewelry and _objets d'art_. Her especial fad, you know,
were those exquisite translucent enamels, just like her butterflies.

"Well, when her father died, and the crash came, Marcia, who was already
ranked as a professional among people who knew about those things,
decided to go into it as a business and support her mother and herself.

"But that is where the old lady comes in. Obstinate as a mule, weak as
water, with a lot of silly, old-fashioned pride, she absolutely balked,
had hysterics, took to her bed, did all the possible and impossible
things that women do under such circumstances, with the result that
Marcia was at her wit's end. Finally, the mother