When she came in the following day, his butterfly diary awaited her on the desk. She opened it with reverent fingertips, incredulous of her good fortune. And so at last she encountered the man himself, first hand, running to meet him down the closely written pages, breathless with excitement. She followed him to Simla and the mountains beyond, to the Calcutta suburbs, to Cairo, Khartum, and most mysteriously to Trinidad, where a homesick padre, himself an ardent entomologist, had taken him to his own favorite collecting ground near the reservoir.

The reasons for Hilary’s journeys to these far places were all left out, the duties he accomplished there were never mentioned. But Hilary himself emerged in essence from the pages—casual, humorous, leisurely, dramatically understated, infinitely lovable and sane; objecting to the prolonged death-struggles of the hardy Parnassius in a German missionary’s killing-bottle when his own specimen was long since quiet after the usual expert pinch; objecting still more strongly to the prevalence of water-buffalo near a rich collecting field at Penang; objecting most strongly of all to a tiger-hunt which he had no wish to join; referring briefly to a place where two of his bearers had died; and even more tersely to some shooting which had occurred after the Pyrameis was taken, somewhere beyond Khyber. Afridis, Hindus, Arabs, and West Indians flashed past as she read. And always there was Hilary, equally ready for laughter or gunfire, and never approving of cyanide-bottles.

The little black notebook brought her a new world — Hilary’s world. It answered so many of her questions, it made him so near, so completely alive. It was a happiness beyond anything she had hoped for. It brought different books off the shelves, too, from the ones she had been accustomed to read; books about the places where he had been. India ceased to be Kipling a lifetime ago, and became Hilary only yesterday. Egypt was no longer just a pink place on the map, for Hilary had seen it, and brought back three butterflies. And Trinidad—one had hardly even heard of Trinidad, but Hilary had been there, and it was beautiful.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ONE rainy day she did not come, and towards tea time he got lonely. She must be somewhere in the house, he felt sure, on account of the weather. He went out and listened over the banister but the house was very still— so still that the fine beat of rain against its window panes and the drip from its eaves could be heard where he stood. By leaning way out he could see the closed door of Sabrina’s room, and a dim uneasiness pervaded him. Yesterday she had sneezed three times, and remarked philosophically to Muffin that she must be getting a cold. She might be ill....