it, to Miss Jencks's sorrow, but had invented a
charming fashion of embroidery for herself and worked fitfully at tiny
white butterflies in the corner of my cambric handkerchiefs--the one
and only form this art of hers ever took. It became a sort of emblem
and insignia of her, and Whistler, who began coming to them, I think,
the year after that, or the next, made much of this fanciful bond
between them. It was she who worked the black butterfly upon the lapel
of his evening coat which created such a sensation in Paris one
season.

Once while shooting in the Rockies with Upgrove, six or eight years
ago, I pulled out an old buckskin tobacco pouch, turned it hopefully
inside out in the search for a stray thimbleful, and discovered in a
corner of the lining a faded yellow silk butterfly, all unknown to me
till then! She must have worked it surreptitiously, like a
mischievous, affectionate child; and as I held it in my hands, and
stared at the graceful absurd thing, the lonely camp faded before me;
the sizzling bacon, the rough shelter, the whistling guide, slipped
back into some inconsequential past, and I lay again on the sun-warmed
rocks, watching a yellow-headed toddler prying damp pebbles from the
beach, to pile them later in her tolerant lap. Oh, Margarita! Oh, the
happy days!

CHAPTER XXI

HESTER PRYNNE'S SECRET

I remember so well the morning of the great discovery. It was one of
those damp, rainy, grey days when happy people can afford to realise
contentment indoors, and we were a very comfortable group indeed:
Margarita sorting music, Roger drawing plans for a new chimney, Miss
Jencks shaking a coral rattle for the delectation of the tiny Mary,
who lay in her shallow basket under the lee of the great
spinning-wheel, and I hugging the fire and watching them. I considered
Roger's reforms in the matter of chimneys too thorough-going for the
slender frame of the house and told him so.

"You'll batter the thing to pieces," I said, "see here!" and lifting
my stick, which I had been poking at the baby after the irrelevant
fashion of old bachelor friends, I hit out aimlessly at the side of
the fireplace and struck one of the bricks a smart blow on one end. It
turned slightly and slipped out of its place, and as I shouted
triumphantly and pulled it away, I displaced its neighbour, too, and
poked scornfully at a third. This, however, was firm as a rock, as
well as all the others near it, and with a little exci