She sat looking at the creature, her hands lying clasped in her lap.
"It's a very odd thing," she said to herself, "that a lover can find this creature even if he[pg 280] be miles and miles away.... Maybe he's on his way now——"
Instinctively she sprang up and closed her bedroom window.
"No," she said, looking severely at the motionless moth, "you shall have no visitors in my room. You may remain here; I shall not disturb you; and tomorrow you will go away of your own accord. But I cannot permit you to receive company——"
A heavy fall on the floor above checked her. Breathless, listening, she crept to her door.
"Karl!" she called.
Listening again, she could hear distant and vaguely dreadful sounds from the gardener-student's room above.
She was frightened but she went up. The youth had had a bad hemorrhage. She sat beside him late into the night. After his breathing grew quieter, sitting there in silence she could hear odd sounds, rustling, squeaking sounds from the box of Death's Head chrysalids on the night table beside his bed.
The pupæ of the Death's Head were making merry in anticipation of the rapidly approach[pg 281]ing change—the Great Adventure of their lives—the coming metamorphosis.
The youth lay asleep now. As she extinguished the candle and stole from the room, all the pupæ of the Death's Head began to squeak in the darkness.