"Thank you. I am quite well. The air is mild and grateful.... I thank mademoiselle for her solicitude."
She returned to her room and lighted her candle. On the white plaster wall sat the Death's Head moth.
She had not been in her room all day. She was astonished that the moth had not left.
"Shall I have to put you out?" she thought dubiously. "Really, I can not keep my window closed for fear of visitors for you, Madam Death! I certainly shall be obliged to put you out."
So she found a sheet of paper and a large glass tumbler. Over the moth she placed the tumbler, then slipped the sheet of paper under the glass between moth and wall.
The thing cried and cried, beating at the glass with wings as powerful as a bird's, and the girl, startled and slightly repelled, placed the moth on her night table, imprisoned under the tumbler.
For a while it fluttered and flapped and cried out in its strange, uncanny way, then[pg 285] settled on the sheet of paper, quivering its wings, both eyes like living coals.
Seated on the bedside, Maryette looked at it, schooling herself to think of it kindly as one of God's creatures before she released it at her open window.
And, as she sat there, something came whizzing into the room through her window, circled around her at terrific speed with a humming, whispering whirr, then dropped with a solid thud on the night table beside the imprisoned female moth.
It was the first suitor arrived from outer darkness—a big, powerful Death's Head moth with eyes aglow, the yellow skull displayed in startling contrast on his velvet-black body.