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“Empty,” said I.

“Then he didn’t take my advice and rent it. The painter-man, I mean.”

“He’s gone.”

“Where?”

“I haven’t an idea.”

“Doesn’t he ever come back?”

“You must not assume,” said I with severity, “that you are the only devotee of high art. You may perhaps compare your devotion to that of another whom I might mention when you, too, have lost ten pounds and gained ten years–“

“Dominie! Has he?”

“Has he what?”

“G-g-g-gained ten pounds. I mean, lost ten years.”

“I haven’t said so.”

“Dominie, you are a cruel old man,” accused the butterfly.

“And you are a wicked woman.”

“I’m not. I’m only twenty,” was her irrelevant but natural defense.

“Witness, on your oath, answer; were you at any time in the evening or night before you departed from this, Our Square, leaving us desolate–were you, I say, abroad in the park?

“Y-y-yes, your Honor.”

“In the immediate vicinity of this bench?”

“Benches are very alike in the dark.”

“But occupants of them are not. Don’t fence with the court. Were you wearing one or more roses of the general hue and device of those now displayed in your cheeks?”

“The honorable court has nothing to do with my face,” said the witness defiantly.

“On the contrary, your face is the corpus delicti. Did you, taking advantage of the unconscious and hence defenseless condition of my client, that is, of Mr. Martin Dyke, lean over him and deliberately imprint a–“

“No! No! No! No! No!” cried the butterfly with great and unconvincing fervor. “How dare you accuse me of such a thing?”

“On the circumstantial evidence of a pink rose petal. But worse is coming. The charge is unprovoked and willful murder.”

Butterflies are strange creatures. This one seemed far less concerned over the latter than the former accusation. “Of whom?” she inquired.

“You have killed a budding poet.” Here I violated a sacred if implied confidence by relating what the bewitched sleeper on the bench had said under the spell of the moon.

The result was most gratifying. The butterfly assured me with indignation that it was only a cold in her head, which had been annoying her for days: that was what made her eyes act so, and I was a suspicious and malevolent old gentleman–and–and–and perhaps some day she and Mr. Martin Dyke might happen to meet.

“Is that a message?” I asked.

“No,” answered the butterfly with a suspicion of panic in her eyes.

“Then?” I queried.

“He’s so–so awfully go-aheadish,” she complained.

“I’ll drop him a hint,” I offered kindly.

“It might do some good. I’m afraid of him,” she confessed.

“And a little bit of yourself?” I suggested.

The look of scorn which she bent upon me would have withered incontinently anything less hardy than a butterfly-devouring orchid. It passed and thoughtfulness supplanted it. “If you really think that he could be influenced to be more–well, more conventional–“

“I guarantee nothing; but I’m a pedagogue by profession and have taught some hard subjects in my time.”

“Then do you think you could give him a little message, word for word as I give it to you?”

“Senile decay,” I admitted, “may have paralyzed most of my faculties, but as a repeater of messages verbatim, I am faithful as a phonograph.”

“Tell him this, then.” She ticked the message off on her fingers. “A half is not exactly the same as a whole. Don’t forget the ‘exactly.'”

“Is this an occasion for mathematical axioms?” I demanded. But she had already gone, with a parting injunction to be precise.

When, three days thereafter, I retailed that banality to young Mr. Dyke, it produced a startling though not instantaneous effect.

“I’ve got it!” he shouted.

“Don’t scare me off my bench! What is it you’ve got?”

“The answer. She said he was not exactly her brother.”

“Who?”

“That bully-looking big chap in the roadster who took her away.” He delivered this shameless reversal of a passionately asserted opinion without a quiver. “Now she says a half isn’t exactly the same as a whole. He wasn’t exactly her brother, she said; he’s her half brother. ‘Toora-loora-loo,’ as we say in Patagonia.”