For a strange thing had happened The wings of the insect were lying on the floor of the box; the white quartz which formed its body had slipped from the gold wire which held it up, and the Golden Butterfly was in pieces.
He opened the box with a little gold key and took out the fragments of the two wings and the body.
"Gone!" he said. "Broken!
"'If this golden Butterfly fall and break,
Farewell the Luck of Gilead P. Beck.'
"Your own lines, Mr. Dunquerque. Broken into little bits it is. The Ile run dry, the credit exhausted, and the Pile fooled away."
No one spoke.
"I am sorry for you most, Mr. Dunquerque. I am powerful sorry, sir. I had hoped, with the assistance of Miss Fleming, to divide that Pile with you. Now, sir, I've got nothing. Not a red cent left to divide with a beggar.
"Mrs. L'Estrange," he went on, "those last words of mine were prophetic. When I am gone back to America—I suppose the odds and ends here will pay my passage—you'll remember that I said the Luck would some day go."
It was all so sudden, so incomprehensible, that no one present had a word to say, either of sympathy or of sorrow.