“You never did have any reasoning power, Mary Virginia,” said Laurence, with brotherly tact.  “Our black cat Panch would put it all over you.  Allow me to inform you I’m not biggity, miss!  I’m logical—­something a girl can’t understand.  And I’d like to know what you think you’re going to grow up to be?”

“Oh, let’s quit talking about it,” she said petulantly.  “I hate to think of growing up.  Grown ups don’t seem to be happy—­and I want to be happy!” She turned her head, and met once more the absorbed and watchful stare of the man in the wheel-chair.

“Weren’t you sorry when you had to stop being a little boy and grow up?” she asked him, wistfully.

“Me?” he laughed harshly.  “I couldn’t say, miss.  I guess I was born grown up.”  His face darkened.

“That wasn’t a bit fair,” said she, with instant sympathy.

“There’s a lot not fair,” he told her, “when you’re born and brought up like I was.  The worst is not so much what happens to you, though that’s pretty bad; it’s that you don’t know it’s happening—­and there’s nobody to put you wise.  Why,” his forehead puckered as if a thought new to him had struck him, “why, your very looks get to be different!”

Mary Virginia started.  “Oh, looks!” said she, thoughtfully.  “Now, isn’t it curious for you to say just that, right now, for it reminds me that I brought something to the Padre—­something that set me to thinking about people’s looks, too,—­and how you never can tell.  Wait a minute, and I’ll show you.”  She reached for the pretty crocheted bag she had brought with her, and drew from it a small pasteboard box.  None of us, idly watching her, dreamed that a moment big with fate was upon us.  I have often wondered how things would have turned out if Mary Virginia had lost or forgotten that pasteboard box!

“I happened to put my hand on a tree—­and this little fellow moved, and I caught him.  I thought at first he was a part of the tree-trunk, he looked so much like it,” said the child, opening the little box.  Inside lay nothing more unusual than a dark-colored and rather ugly gray moth, with his wings folded down.

“One wouldn’t think him pretty, would one?” said she, looking down at the creature.

“No,” said Flint, who had wheeled nearer, and craned his neck over the box.  “No, miss, I shouldn’t think I’d call something like that pretty,”—­he looked from the moth to Mary Virginia, a bit disappointedly.

Mary Virginia smiled, and picking up the little moth, held his body, very gently, between her finger-tips.  He fluttered, spreading out his gray wings; and then one saw the beautiful pansy-like underwings, and the glorious lower pair of scarlet velvet barred and bordered with black.

“I brought him along, thinking the Padre might like him, and tell me something about him,” said the little girl.  “The Padre’s crazy about moths and butterflies, you must understand, and we’re always on the lookout to get them for him.  I never found this particular one before, and you can’t imagine how I felt when he showed me what he had hidden under that gray cloak of his!”