"Oh, no, no, no, no, that would never do! God forbid that you should go to his rooms! He must have left them in the safe! He had to leave them in the safe!" "Sure he's left them in the safe: why shouldn't he?" he made light of my palpable fears. Slipping into his gray overcoat, he pulled on his felt hat, thrust his hands into his wellworn dogskin gloves, and picked up the package. Nobody in the world ever looked less like a criminal than this brown-faced, keen-eyed man with his pleasant bearing. Why, this was John Flint, the kindly bug-hunter all Appleboro loved, "that good and kind and Christian man, our brother John Flint, sometimes known as the Butterfly Man." "Now, don't you worry any at all, parson," he was saying. "There's nothing to be afraid of. I'll take care of myself, and I'll get those letters if they're in existence. I've got to get them. What else was I born for, I'd like to know?" The question caught me like a lash across the face. "You were born," I said violently, "to win an honored name, to do a work of inestimable value. And you are deliberately and quixotically risking it, and I allow you to risk it, because a girl's happiness hangs in the balance! If you are detected it means your own ruin, for you could never explain away those tools. Yes! You are facing possible ruin and disgrace. You might have to give up your work for years--have you considered that? Oh, John Flint, stop a moment, and reflect! There is nothing in this for you, John, nothing but danger. No, there's nothing in it for you, except--" He held up his hand, with a gesture of dignity and reproach. "--except that I get my big chance to step in and save the girl I happen to love, from persecution and wretchedness, if not worse," said he simply. "If I can do that, what the devil does it matter what happens to _me_? You talk about name and career! Man, man, what could anything be worth to me if I had to know she was unhappy?" The tides of emotion rushed over him and flooded his face into a shining-eyed passion nakedly unashamed and beautiful. And I had thought him casual, carelessly accepting a risk! "Parson," he wondered, "didn't you _know_? No, I suppose it wouldn't occur to anybody that a man of my sort should love a girl of hers. But I do. I think I did the first time I ever laid eyes on her, and she a girl-kid in a red jacket, with curls about her shoulders and a face like a little new rose in the morning. Remember her eyes, parson, how blue they were? And how she looked at me, so friendly--_me_, mind you, as I was! And she handed me a Catocala moth, and she gave me Kerry. 'You're such a good man, Mr. Flint!' says she, and by God, she meant it! Little Mary Virginia! And she got fast hold of something in me that was never anybody's but hers, that couldn't ever belong to anybody but her, no, not if I lived for a thousand years and had the pick of the earth.