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. XI Time did pass--in days and weeks of that quiet sort which make us forget in actual life that such is the way in good stories also. Innumerable crops were growing in the fields, countless ships were sailing or steaming the monotonous leagues of their long wanderings from port to port, some empty, some heavy-laden, like bees between garden and hive: The corn-tops were ripe and the meadows were in bloom And the birds made music all the day.