Small wonder that I did not connect those pictures with the fate of Mary Virginia Eustis!  No, I did not immediately grasp their tremendous bearing upon the petitions I was repeating.  And all the while, with a dull insistence, an enraging persistence, they flickered before the eyes of my memory—­the Poles, the screaming cursing tramp; Westmoreland pondering aloud as to why he had been permitted to save so apparently worthless a life; and the little saint hiding from the eyes of men all traces of lost Slippy McGee.  Nor, more curiously yet, did I connect them with the Butterfly Man.  The Butterfly Man was somebody else altogether, another and a different person, a man of whom even one’s secretest thoughts were admiring and respectful.  He was so far removed from the very shadow of such things as these, that it did one’s conscience a sort of violence to think of him in connection with them.  I tried to dismiss the memories from my mind.  I wished to concentrate wholly upon the problem of Mary Virginia.

And then that mysterious, hidden self-under-self that lives in us far, far beneath thought and instinct and conscience and heredity and even consciousness itself, rose to the surface with a message: 

Slippy McGee had been the greatest cracksman in all America.... “Honest to God, skypilot, I can open any box made, easy as easy!” ... And even as his tools were hidden in St. Stanislaus, Slippy McGee himself was hidden in John Flint.

Recoiling, I clung to the altar railing.  What dreadful thing was I contemplating, what fearful temptation was assailing me, here under the light of the sanctuary lamp?  I looked reproachfully at St. Stanislaus, as if that seraphic youth had betrayed my confidence.  I suspected him of being too anxious to rid himself of the ambiguous trust imposed upon him without so much as a by-your-leave.  Perhaps he was secretly irked at the use to which his painted semblance had been put, and seized this first opportunity to extricate himself from a position in which the boldest saint of them all might well hesitate to find himself.

I began to consider John Flint as he was, the work he had accomplished, the splendid structure of that life slowly and laboriously made over and lived so cleanly in the light of day.  Not only had that old evil personality been sloughed off like a larval skin; he had come forth from it another creature, a being lovable, wise, tender, full of charm.  Even the hint of melancholy that was becoming more and more a part of him endeared him to others, for the broader and brighter the light into which he was steadily mounting, the more marked and touching was this softening shadow.

And I who had been the accoucheur of his genius, I who had watched and prayed and ministered beside the cradle of his growth, was I of all men to threaten his overthrow?  Alas, what madness was upon me that I was evoking before the very altar the grim ghost of Slippy McGee?