"By the way," said Hayden suddenly, "isn't that your secretary at the door?"
Ydo looked up surprised. "Certainly, it is Eunice," she said, "I wonder—"
Eunice, mournful and repressed, walked primly down the room in the wake of a waiter and with a murmured word or two with the Mariposa, handed her a telegram. The latter, still with an expression of perplexity, requested Mrs. Ames' permission to open it, acquainted herself with its contents, and then turned to the secretary at her elbow.
"That is all right, Eunice. There is no answer." Then she leaned across Hayden and spoke to Marcia, "Nothing of any importance," with a faint shrug of the shoulders, "I dare say you will get one also. He merely says that he will not be home quite so soon as he expected."
"He!" "He!" Hayden knew a pang of jealousy, like a stab of a stiletto. What "he" was of such interest to Marcia that he should send her telegrams announcing his return home, or his failure to come? And why should this person, whoever he might be, also telegraph Ydo? His thoughts reverted involuntarily to the gray‑haired man "that ordinary, middle‑aged person," who had accompanied her the night she had dined at the Gildersleeve, the night that he, Hayden, had returned to her her silver butterfly. Who was this shadowy creature, a sinister and skulking figure always in the background? Doubts and fears assailed him. He suffered a hades of suspicion, a momentary and temporary hades—and then, he looked at Marcia. She was talking across the table to Horace Penfield, and Hayden noted the purely drawn oval of her face, the sensitive, delicate mouth, the sweet, wistful eyes, and all the incipient doubts which had made such an onrush upon his consciousness vanished, were routed and put to flight, and Marcia looked up to meet his gaze and suddenly, shyly, sweetly blushed. Again the world was his and his heart was flooded with sunshine.
Mrs. Ames, well‑pleased with the notice her party had attracted, was complacently arranging her bracelets preparatory to rising, when her eye was evidently caught by the iridescent sheen of Marcia's butterflies. She held up her glasses, the better to view them.
"There is no manner of doubt about it, Miss Oldham," she said in a rather dry and grudging fashion, "that your butterflies are exquisite. I'm a judge of jewels. I know. What's the reason, Miss Gipsy, that you haven't a set? Not economy, I warrant."
Ydo glanced at her from under her eyes, a slow, audacious smile forming about her lips, "I mean to have a set," she said composedly, "but I want mine copied from one Mr. Hayden has in his collection."
Marcia turned surprised eyes on Hayden. "I did not know that you were a collector of butterflies," she said.
"Oh, he is so modest!" Ydo's laughter rang out like a chime of bells, full of elfin malice. "But I am going to tell you a secret. He is the distinguished discoverer of a rare and wonderful specimen of almost fabulous value. A specimen which collectors have supposed to be quite extinct."