"Worth twenty of any of us," he said. "We are in the same boat."
"And you, too, Captain Ladds!" Gilead cried. "It is worse than my own misfortune, because I am a rough man and can go back to the rough life. No, Mrs. L'Estrange—no, my dear young lady—I can't—not with the same light heart as before—you've spoiled me. I must strike out something new—away from Empire City and Ile and gold. I'm spoiled. It's not the cold chunk of pork that I am afraid of; it is the beautiful life and the sweetness that I'm going to lose. I said I hoped I should be prepared to meet the fall of my Luck—when it came. But I never thought it would come like this."
"Stay with us, Mr. Beck," said Phillis. "Don't go back to the old life."
"Stay with us," said Jack. "We will all live together."
"Do not leave us, Mr. Beck," said Mrs. L'Estrange. (Women can blush, although they may be past forty.) "Stay here with your friends."
He looked from one to the other, and something like a tear glittered in his eye. But he shook his head.
Then he took up the wings of the Butterfly, the pretty golden laminæ cut in the perfect shape of a wing, marked and veined by Nature as if, for once she was determined to show that she too could be an Artist and imitate her self. They lay in her hands, and he looked fondly at them.
"What shall I do with these?" he said softly. "They have been very good to me. They have given me the pleasantest hours of my life. They have made me dream of power as if I was Autocrat of All the Russians. Say, Mrs. L'Estrange—since my chief pleasure has come through Mr. Dunquerque—may I offer the broken Butterfly to Miss Fleming?"
He laid the wings before her with a sweet sad smile. Jack took them up and looked at them. In the white quartz were the little holes where the wings had fitted. He put them back in their old place—the wings in the quartz. They fitted exactly, and in a moment the butterfly was as it had always been.
Jack deftly bent round it again the golden wire which held it to the golden flower. Singular to relate, the wire fitted like the wings just the same as before, and the Butterfly vibrated on its perch again.