“She led me the devil’s own chase, for I’d nothing but my hat to net her with.  A dozen times I thought I had her, and missed.  It was heart-breaking.  I felt I’d go stark crazy if she got away from me.  I had to get her.  And the Lord was good and rewarded me for my patience, for I caught her at the end of a mile run.  I was so blown by then that I had to lie down in the grass by the roadside and get my wind back.  Then I slid my handkerchief easy-easy under my hat, tilted it up, and here she is!  She hasn’t hurt herself, for she’s been quiet.  She’s perfect.  She hasn’t rubbed off a scale.  She’s the size of a bat.  Her upper wings, and one lower wing, are black, curiously splotched with yellow, and one lower wing is all yellow.  She’s got the usual orange spots on the secondaries, only bigger, and blobs of gold, and the purple spills over onto the ground-color.  She’s a wonder.  Come on in and let’s gloat at our ease—­I haven’t half seen her yet!  She’s the biggest and most wonderful Turnus ever made.  Why, Gabriel could wear her in his crown to make himself feel proud, because there’d be only one like her in heaven!”

He took a step forward; but I could only stand still and blink, owlishly.  My heart pounded and the blood roared in my ears like the wind in the pinetrees.  My senses were in a most painful confusion, with but one thought struggling clear above the turmoil:  that John Flint had come back.

“But you didn’t go!” I stammered.  “Oh, John Flint, John Flint, you didn’t go!”

He snorted.  “Catch me running away like a fool when a six-inch off-color swallow-tail flirts herself under my nose and dares me to catch her!  You’d better believe I didn’t go!”

And then I knew with a great uprush of joy that Slippy McGee himself had gone instead, and the three-o’clock express was bearing him away, forever and forever, beyond recall or return.  Slippy McGee had gone into the past; he was dead and done with.  But John Flint the naturalist was vibrantly and vitally alive, built upon the living rock, a house not to be washed away by any wave of passion.

This reaction from the black and bitter hour through which I had just passed, this turbulent joy and relief, overcame me.  My knees shook and gave way; I tottered, and sank helplessly into the seat built around our great magnolia.  And shaken out of all self-control I wept as I had not been permitted to weep over my own dead, my own overthrown hopes.  Head to foot I was shaken as with some rending sickness.  The sobs were torn out of my throat with gasps.

He stood stone still.  He went white, and his nostrils grew pinched, and in his set face only his eyes seemed alive and suffering.  They blinked at me, as if a light had shone too strongly upon them.  A sort of inarticulate whimper came from him.  Then with extreme care he laid the handkerchief-covered hat upon the ground, and down upon his knees he went beside me, his arms about my knees.  He, too, was trembling.