At last Hapley began to realise in what direction the pre-occupation tended.  He determined to make a fight for it, and started by trying to read novels.  But he could not get his mind off Pawkins, white in the face and making his last speech—­every sentence a beautiful opening for Hapley.  He turned to fiction—­and found it had no grip on him.  He read the “Island Nights’ Entertainments” until his “sense of causation” was shocked beyond endurance by the Bottle Imp.  Then he went to Kipling, and found he “proved nothing,” besides being irreverent and vulgar.  These scientific people have their limitations.  Then unhappily, he tried Besant’s “Inner House,” and the opening chapter set his mind upon learned societies and Pawkins at once.

So Hapley turned to chess, and found it a little more soothing.  He soon mastered the moves and the chief gambits and commoner closing positions, and began to beat the Vicar.  But then the cylindrical contours of the opposite king began to resemble Pawkins standing up and gasping ineffectually against check-mate, and Hapley decided to give up chess.

Perhaps the study of some new branch of science would after all be better diversion.  The best rest is change of occupation.  Hapley determined to plunge at diatoms, and had one of his smaller microscopes and Halibut’s monograph sent down from London.  He thought that perhaps if he could get up a vigorous quarrel with Halibut, he might be able to begin life afresh and forget Pawkins.  And very soon he was hard at work in his habitual strenuous fashion, at these microscopic denizens of the way-side pool.

It was on the third day of the diatoms that Hapley became aware of a novel addition to the local fauna.  He was working late at the microscope, and the only light in the room was the brilliant little lamp with the special form of green shade.  Like all experienced microscopists, he kept both eyes open.  It is the only way to avoid excessive fatigue.  One eye was over the instrument, and bright and distinct before that was the circular field of the microscope, across which a brown diatom was slowly moving.  With the other eye Hapley saw, as it were, without seeing.  He was only dimly conscious of the brass side of the instrument, the illuminated part of the table-cloth, a sheet of notepaper, the foot of the lamp, and the darkened room beyond.

Suddenly his attention drifted from one eye to the other.  The table-cloth was of the material called tapestry by shopmen, and rather brightly coloured.  The pattern was in gold, with a small amount of crimson and pale blue upon a greyish ground.  At one point the pattern seemed displaced, and there was a vibrating movement of the colours at this point.

Hapley suddenly moved his head back and looked with both eyes.  His mouth fell open with astonishment.

It was a large moth or butterfly; its wings spread in butterfly fashion!

It was strange it should be in the room at all, for the windows were closed.  Strange that it should not have attracted his attention when fluttering to its present position.  Strange that it should match the table-cloth.  Stranger far that to him, Hapley, the great entomologist, it was altogether unknown.  There was no delusion.  It was crawling slowly towards the foot of the lamp.