“He’s a member of a large and most respectable family, the Catocalae,” I told her.  “I’ll take him, my dear, and thank you—­there’s always a demand for the Catocalae.  And you may call him an Underwing, if you prefer—­that’s his common name.”

“I got to thinking,” said the little girl, thoughtfully, lifting her clear and candid eyes to John Flint’s.  “I got to thinking, when he threw aside his plain gray cloak and showed me his lovely underwings, that he’s like some people—­people you’d think were very common, you know.  You couldn’t be expected to know what was underneath, could you?  So you pass them by, thinking how ordinary, and matter of fact, and uninteresting and even ugly they are, and you feel rather sorry for them—­because you don’t know.  But if you can once get close enough to touch them—­why, then you find out!” Her eyes grew deeper, and brighter, as they do when she is moved; and the color came more vividly to her cheek.  “Don’t you reckon,” said she naively, “that plenty of folks are like him?  They’re the sad color of the street-dust, of course, for things do borrow from their surroundings, didn’t you know that?  That’s called protective mimicry, the Padre says.  So you only think of the dust-colored outside—­and all the while the underwings are right there, waiting for you to find them!  Isn’t it wonderful and beautiful?  And the best of all is, it’s true!”

The cripple in the chair put out his hand with a hint of timidity in his manner; he was staring at Mary Virginia as if some of the light within her had dimly penetrated his grosser substance.

“Could I hold it—­for a minute—­in my own hand?” he asked, turning brick-red.

“Of course you may,” said Mary Virginia pleasantly.  “I see by the Padre’s face this isn’t a rare moth—­he’s been here all along, only my eyes have just been opened to him.  I don’t want him to go in any collection.  I don’t want him to go anywhere, except back into the air—­I owe him that for what he taught me.  So I’m sure the Padre won’t mind, if you’d like to set him free, yourself.”

She put the moth on the man’s finger, delicately, for a Catocala is a swift-winged little chap; it spread out its wings splendidly, as if to show him its loveliness; then, darting upward, vanished into the cool green depth of the shrubbery.

“I remember running after a butterfly once, when I was a kid,” said he.  “He came flying down our street, Lord knows where from, or why, and I caught him after a chase.  I thought he was the prettiest thing ever my eyes had seen, and I wanted the worst way in the world to keep him with me.  A brown fellow he was, all sprinkled over with little splotches of silver, as if there’d been plenty of the stuff on hand, and it’d been laid on him thick.  But after awhile I got to thinking he’d feel like he was in jail, shut up in my hot fist.  I couldn’t bear that, so I ran to the end of the street, to save him from the other kids, and then I turned him loose and watched him beat it for the sky.  They’re pretty things, butterflies.  Somehow I always liked them better than any other living creatures.”  He was staring after the moth, his forehead wrinkled.  He spoke almost unconsciously, and he certainly had no idea that he had given us cause for a hopeful astonishment.