s time had any great experience with the passion of
jealousy. But a man who reads the newspapers, or has done his turn at
jury duty in Criminal Sessions, cannot be ignorant of the desperate
acts to which now and again it drives men and women.

Hilda, according to the slight knowledge I had of her character, was
gentle and patient; she would be treated by Lucy as all Lucy's servants
were, with the greatest tact and friendliness, and still the mere fact
of her presence in that house filled me with forebodings. She would be
in a position to make so much trouble, if ever anything should happen
to start her on the war path. She had proved already that her moral
nature was not superior to eavesdropping; already she had my secret by
the ears, and one-sided and innocent though that secret may have
appeared to her, it was not really a one-sided secret, and when she had
got her clutch upon the other side, she could be almost as dangerous
and mischievous as you please.

At best, Hilda was one more difficulty with which Lucy and I would have
to contend.

It would have been wisest to tell Lucy all that I knew about Hilda.
But you may have noticed with butterflies that they do not fly the
straight line between two points; rather they fly in circles, with
back-tracking, excursions, and gyrations, so that unless you have seen
them start you cannot guess where they have started from, nor until the
wings close and the insects come to a definite rest, are you in a
position to know what their objective was.

In the face of our recently declared love for each other, any mention
of Hilda's below-stairs passion for the "young master" seemed to me a
blatant indelicacy. Almost it might have a quality of pluming and
boasting, a gross acceptance of man's polygamous potentialities.

There would be time later for conversations in which future
practicalities should take precedence over romantic fancies and
protestations. Just now the Butterfly did not care a rap what should
happen when winter came; for the present the world was filled with
flowers--all his, and all containing honey.

XXI

"He broke up their home," is a familiar phrase. But few men in the act
of breaking up a home realize the gravity of what they are about. I
had gone a long way toward breaking up Fulton's happy family life
without having the slightest notion that I was doing anything of the
kind. When Lucy fell out of love with her husband, it was not because