"Oh, bother, bother!" sighed the Dryad. "There are flowers—the sparkleberry is in blossom—there is bloom on the China tree, but this phantom never stops! Can nothing stop it?"
Day after day, guarding the long, white road, the Dryad saw the phantom pass—always flying north; day after day in the dim forest, the hurrying, pale-winged, tireless creatures fled away, darting always along some fixed yet invisible aërial path. Nothing lured them, neither the perfumed clusters of the China-berry, nor the white forest flowers; nothing checked them, neither the woven curtain of creepers across the forest barrier, nor the jungle walled with palms.
To the net of the Dryad and of Jones had fallen half a thousand jewelled victims; the exquisite bronzed Berenice, the velvet and yellow Palamedes, the great orange-winged creatures brilliant as lighted lanterns. But in the gemmed symmetry of the casket the opalescent heart was missing; and the Dryad, uncomforted, haunted the woodlands, roaming in defiance of the turquoise-tinted lizards and the possible serpent whose mouth is lined with snow-white membranes—prowling in contempt of that coiled horror that lies waiting, S shaped, a mass of matted grey and velvet diamond pattern from which two lidless eyes glitter unwinking.
"How on earth did anybody ever catch an Ajax?" inquired the Dryad at the close of one fruitless, bootless day's pursuit.
"I suppose," said Jones, "that every year or so the Ajax alights." That was irony.
"On what?" insisted the Dryad.
"Oh, on—something," said Jones, vaguely. "Butterflies are, no doubt, like the human species; flowers tempt some butterflies, mud-puddles attract others. One or the other will attract our Ajax some day."
That night Jones, with book open upon his knees, sat in the lamplight of the great veranda and read tales of Ajax to the Dryad; how that, in the tropics, Ajax assumes four forms, masquerading as Floridensis in winter and as Telamonides in summer, and how he wears the exquisite livery of Marcellus, too, and even assumes, according to a gentleman named Walsh, a fourth form. Beautiful pictures of Ajax illumined the page where were also engraved the signs of Mars and of Venus. The Dryad looked at these; Jones looked at her; the rest of the hotel looked at them. Jones read on.
Sleepy-eyed the Dryad listened; outside in the burnished moonlight the whippoorwill's spirit call challenged the star-set silence; and far away in the blue night she heard the deep breathing of the sea. Presently the Dryad slept in her rocking-chair, curved wrist propping her head; Jones was chagrined. He need not have been, for the Dryad was dreaming of him.