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And all this life and beauty, this gay glory and tremorous ecstasy and effort was here for moth-love of one incarnate fever of frail-winged loveliness! Oh! to what unguessed archangelic observation, to what infinite seraphic compassion, may not our own swarming race, who dare not too much pity ourselves, be but just such dainty ephemera! Splendid in purposes, intelligence, and affections as these in colors and grace, glorious when on the wing, and marvellous still, riddles of wonder, even when crawling and quivering, tipping and swerving from the upright and true, like these palpitating flowers of desire, now this way and now that, forever drawn and driven by the sweet tyrannies of instinct and impulse.

So rushed the thought in upon me, and if it was not of the divinest or manliest inspiration, at least it took some uncharity out of me for the moment. As in mechanical silence Fontenette obeyed the busy requests of the entomologist, I presently looked more on those two than on the winged multitude, and thought on, of the myriad true tales of love-weakness and love-wrath for which they and their two pretty mates were just now so unlucky as to stand; of the awful naturalness of such things; of the butterfly beauty and wonder–nay, rather the divine possibilities of the lives such things so naturally speed to wreck; and then of Tom Moore almost too playfully singing:

Ah! did we take for Heaven above
But half such pains as we
Take, day and night, for woman’s love,
What Angels we should be!

But while I moralized there came a change. Beneath the entomologist’s dark hand, as it searched and hurried throughout the room, the flutter of wings had ceased as under a wind of death.

“You must have a hundred and fifty of them,” I said as the last victim ceased to flutter.

“Yes.”

“Their sale is slow, of course, but every time you sell one, you ought to get”–I was judging by some prices he had charged me–“you ought to get two dollars.” And I secretly rejoiced for Senda.

“I not can afford to sell t’em,” he replied, with his back to me.

“Why, how so?”

“No, it iss t’is kind vhat I can exshange for five, six, maybe seven specimenss fon Ahfrica undt Owstrahlia. No, I vill not sell t’em.”

“Oh, I see,” said I, in mortal disgust. “Fontenette, I’m going to bed.” And Fontenette went too.

The next day was cloudless–in two hearts; Senda’s, and Fontenette’s. As to the sky, that is another matter; one of the charms of that warm wet land is that, with all its sunshine, it is almost never without clouds. And indeed it would be truer to say of my two friends’ skies, that they had clouds, but the clouds were silvered through with happy reassurances. Jealousy, we are told, once set on fire, burns without fuel; but I must think that that is oftenest, if not always, the jealousy of a selfish love. Or, rather–let me quote Senda, as she spoke the only other time she ever touched upon the subject with us. Our fat neighbor had dragged it in again as innocently as a young dog brings an old shoe into the parlor, and, the Fontenettes being absent, she had the nerve and wisdom not to avoid it. Said she:

“Some of us–not all–have great power to love. Some, not all, who have sis power–to love–have also se power to trust. Me, I rasser be trustet and not loved, san to be loved and not trustet.”

“How about a little of each?” asked our neighbor.

“Oh! If se nature iss little, sat iss, maybe, very vell–?” She spoke as kindly as a mother to her babe, but he stole a slow glance here and there, as though some one had shot him with a pea in church, and dropped the theme.

Which I, too, will do when I have noted the one thing I had particularly in mind to say, of Fontenette: that, as Senda remarked–for the above is an abridgment–“I rasser see chalousie vissout cause, san cause vissout chalousie;” and that even while I was witness of the profound ferocity of his jealousy when roused, and more and more as time passed on, I was impressed with its sweet reasonableness.