The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Silver Butterfly, by Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

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Title: The Silver Butterfly

Author: Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

Illustrator: Howard Chandler Christy

Release Date: June 17, 2008 [EBook #25820]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration]

THE SILVER BUTTERFLY

By
MRS. WILSON WOODROW

With Illustrations by
HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1908
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
October

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

CHAPTER I

Hayden was back in New York again after several years spent in the
uttermost parts of the earth. He had been building railroads in South
America, Africa, and China, and had maintained so many lodges in this
or that wilderness that he really feared he might be curiously
awkward in adapting himself to the conventional requirements of
civilization. In his long roundabout journey home he had stopped for
a few weeks in both London and Paris; but to his mental discomfort,
they had but served to accentuate his loneliness and whet his
longings for the dear, unforgotten life of his native city, that
intimate, easy existence, wherein relatives, not too near, congenial
friends and familiar haunts played so important a part.

On the journey from London he had felt like a boy going home for the
most delightful holidays after a long period in school, and to calm
and render more normal his elation, he told himself frequently as he
drew nearer his native shores that he was letting himself in for a
terrible disappointment; that all this happy anticipation, this
belief, an intuition almost, that some delightful surprise awaited
him, was the result of many lonely musings under the cold remote
stars in virgin forests and wide deserts, a fleeting mirage born of
homesickness.

But all these cautions and warnings and efforts to stifle this
irrepressible and joyous expectatio