"She has escaped from them, they cannot touch her, she is free!" I exulted. "John, John, you have saved our girl! No matter what they do to Eustis they can't drag her into the quicksands now."
But he went walking up and down, shoulders squared, face uplifted. One might think that after such a night he would have been humanly tired, but he had clean forgotten his body. His eyes shone as with a flame lit from inward, and I think there was on him what the Irish people call the Aisling, the waking vision. For presently he began to speak, as to Somebody very near him.
"Oh, Lord God!" said the Butterfly Man, with a reverent and fierce joy, "she's going to have her happiness now, and it wasn't holy priest nor fine gentleman you picked out to help her toward it—it was me, Slippy McGee, born in the streets and bred in the gutter, with the devil knows who for his daddy and a name that's none of his own! For that I'm Yours for keeps: You've got me.
"You've done all even God Almighty can do, given me more than I ever could have asked You for—and now it's up to me to make good—and I'll do it!"
There came to listening me something of the emotion I experienced when I said my first Mass—as if I had been brought so close to our Father that I could have put out my hand and touched Him. Ah! I had had a very small part to play in this man's redemption. I knew it now, and felt humbled and abashed, and yet grateful that even so much had been allowed me. Not I, but Love, had transformed a sinner and an outlaw into a great scientist and a greater lover. And I remembered Mary Virginia's childish hand putting into his the gray-winged Catocala, and how the little moth, raising the sad-colored wings worn to suit his surroundings, revealed beneath that disfiguring and disguising cloak the exquisite and flower-like loveliness of the underwings.
He paused in his swinging stride, and looked down at me a bit shyly.
"Parson—you see how it is with me?"
"I see. And I think she is the greater lady for it and you the finer gentleman," said I stoutly. "It would honor her, if she were ten times what she is—and she is Mary Virginia."
"She is Mary Virginia," said the Butterfly Man, "and I am—what I am. Yet somehow I feel sure I can care for her, that I can go right on caring for her to the end of time, without hurt to her or sorrow to me." And after a pause, he added, deliberately:
"I found something better than a package of letters to-night, parson. I found—Me."