"Aren't you sorry you said that?"
"Y-e-s, seeing you seem to think it was wrong."
"Well, you'll know better from now on," said Mary Virginia, comfortingly. She looked at him searchingly for a minute, and he met her look without flinching. That had been the one hopeful sign, from the first—that he never refused to meet your glance, but gave you back one just as steady, if more suspicious.
"Mr. Flint," said Mary Virginia, "you've about made up your mind to stay on here with the Padre, haven't you? For a good long while, at any rate? You wouldn't like to leave the Padre, would you?"
He stiffened. One could see the struggle within him.
"Well, miss, I can't see but that I've just got to stay on—for awhile. Until he's tired of me and my ways, anyhow," he said gloomily.
Mary Virginia dismissed my tiredness with an airy wave of her hand. She smiled.
"Do you know," said she earnestly, "I've had the funniest idea about you, from the very first time I saw you? Well, I have. I've somehow got the notion that you and the Padre belong. I think that's why you came. I think you belong right here, in that darling little house, studying butterflies and mounting them so beautifully they look alive. I think you're never going to go away anywhere any more, but that you're going to stay right here as long as you live!"
His face turned an ugly white, and his mouth fell open. He looked at Mary Virginia almost with horror—Saul might have looked thus at the Witch of Endor when she summoned the shade of Samuel to tell him that the kingdom had been rent from his hand and his fate was upon him.
Mary Virginia nodded, thoughtfully.