, she was awake,
listening.

A window had been opened in the room overhead.

She went to the stars and called:

"Karl!"

"What?" came the impatient reply.

"Are you ill?"

"No. N-no, I thank you--" His voice became urbane with an apparent effort.
"Thank you for inquiring----"

"I heard your window open--" she said.

"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 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.

The girl watched him, fascinated. He scrambled over to the tumbler, tested
it with heavy antennae; then, ardent and impatient, beat against the glass
with muscular wings that clattered in the silence.

But it was not the amorous fury of the creature striking the tumbler with
resounding wings, not the glowing eyes, the strong, clawed feet, the
Death's Head staring from its funereal black thorax that held the girl's
attention. It was something else; something entirely different riveted her
eyes on the creature.

For the cigar-sh