Gone was the fine lady, the great beauty, the proud jilt who had broken Laurence's heart and maddened and enslaved Inglesby. Here was only a piteous child with eyes heavy from weeping, with a pale and sad face and drooping childish lips. And yet she was so dear and so lovely, for all her reddened eyelids and her reddened little nose, that one could have wept with her. The Butterfly Man, with an intake of breath, stood up.
"I shall leave you with the Padre now," he said evenly, "to tell him what you wanted to tell him. Father, understand: there's something rotten wrong, as I've been telling you all along. Now she's got to tell you what it is and all about it. Everything. Whether she likes to or not, and no matter what it is, she's got to tell you. You understand that, Mary Virginia?"
She fixed him with a glance that had in it something hostile and oblique. Even with those dearest of women whom I adore, there are moments when I have the impression that they have, so to speak, their ears laid back flat, and I experience what I may justly term cat-fear. I felt it then.
"Oh, don't have too much consideration for my feelings, Mr. Flint!" said she, with that oblique and baffling glance, and the smile Old Fitz once likened to the Curve in the Cat's Tail. "Indeed, why should you go? Why don't you stay and find out why I wanted to run to the Padre—to beg him to find some way to help me, since I can't fall like a plum into Mr. Inglesby's hand when Mr. Hunter shakes the Eustis family tree!"
His breath came whistlingly between his teeth.
"Parson! You hear?" he slapped his leg with his open palm. "Oh, I knew it, I knew it!" And he turned upon her a kindling glance:
"I knew all along it was never in you to be anything but true!" said the Butterfly Man.