Hayden stared at her with the amazement her mental processes always aroused in him.
"It never seemed exactly within the range of romantic subjects to me," he said dubiously; "but perhaps that's the way I've been looking at it."
"Certainly it is," she affirmed triumphantly. "Now I'll prove it to you. As I often say to young people, Mr. Hayden: 'Never make an assertion unless you can prove it.' Now, I distinctly remember Mr. Oldham telling me of a most romantic business matter. A lost mine of almost unthinkable value which was on an old estate somewhere in Brazil, or no, Peru. Why, what is the matter, Mr. Hayden? Your eyes are almost popping out of your head. You look as if you had seen a ghost."
Hayden caught himself together. "It is only that it is so interesting. Do go on and let me hear the rest of it."
Mrs. Oldham smiled, well pleased at the tribute to her powers as a raconteuse. "Well, there isn't much to tell. I've forgotten the details, and they were so romantic, too; but Mr. Oldham seriously considered buying it."
"And did he buy it?" Hayden's hands were trembling in spite of himself. "This is so intensely interesting, one would like to hear the conclusion of the story."
But Mrs. Oldham only shook her head. "I don't know," she said vaguely. "I think he did; but I can't be sure."
She began another long story, but Hayden, after listening to enough of it to assure himself that it had no bearing on The Veiled Mariposa, gave himself up to the confused conjectures, the hopes, the dreams that thronged his brain.
Was it a possibility that Marcia, Marcia, might be the heiress of the great Mariposa estate? The owner, or one of the owners of it? He felt overcome by the bare mental suggestion. But was it a possibility, even a dim and remote one? Accepting this as a temporary hypothesis, was it not borne out by certain facts? The butterflies, for instance. Did not those jeweled ornaments symbolize in some delicate, fanciful way, Marcia's way, her ownership of The Veiled Mariposa? And would not that ownership also account for the much‑questioned source of her wealth? He stopped with a jerk up against a dead wall. The Mariposa mine had not been worked for years; the ranches were cultivated only by the Spaniard in possession. These facts were like a dash of cold water, extinguishing the flame of his hopes. And yet, and yet, the butterflies! But that, he was forced to admit, might be the merest coincidence.
On that chain of evidence he would find it necessary to regard his cousin, Kitty Hampton, Mrs. Habersham, the London actress, a score of women, as possible owners of his Golconda. Nevertheless, in spite of reason, he could not escape the conviction, unfounded but persistent, that those butterflies were in some way connected with the ownership of that distant lost mine. And this purely intuitive belief was suddenly strengthened by the remembrance of Marcia's embarrassment in the Park, an hour or two before, when she had involuntarily and inadvertently spoken of Mademoiselle Mariposa familiarly as Ydo.