How marvellously their delicate wings were poised and proportioned! Some had the texture of velvet and some the sheen of satin; and nature, out of sheer extravagance, had touched them with gold and powdered them with silver. And did ever lord or lady bear a plume so daintily poised as those little creatures bore their delicate _antennæ_? And presently a white creature fluttered in from the bosom of the darkness, a large albino moth with a body covered with white fur and two fern-like _antennæ_; white as a snow-flake it rested upon the green baize.
Just then Vashti entered, coming up to his table in her stately fashion.
“How foolish you are to sit with your window open,” she said. “Don’t you know that the light attracts all those insects?”
Sidney had risen when his wife entered the room. He was almost courtly in his politeness to her. But it was so natural for him to be courteous that all little formalities were graceful as he observed them.
As he rose he knocked down a book. He stooped to pick it up; as he straightened himself he saw Vashti’s hand upraised to strike the white moth.
“Oh, Vashti! don’t! don’t!” he cried, irrepressible pain in his voice; but the blow had fallen.
The moth fluttered about dazedly, trying to escape the shadow of the upraised hand; there was a powdery white mark on the green baize table-top where the first blow had fallen upon it, maiming it without killing it outright.
“Oh, Vashti! Vashti!” he cried again. “Do not kill it, there is so much room in the world.”
He gathered the half-crushed creature, which would never fly again, into a tender hollowed palm, and, opening the shutter, put it forth to die in the darkness from whence it had been drawn by the glimmer of his lamp.
Alas! alas! how many wounded and maimed have been cast forth to die in the darkness from out which their aspirations had drawn them to receive their death wounds. Sidney came back to his table, a sick pain at his heart.
Presently Vashti put her arms about his head, and drawing it back upon her breast, placed her cool finger-tips upon his eyes.
He accepted the mute apology with swift responsive tenderness. And as she held him thus the woman’s weakness, latent even in her, forced itself to the surface for a moment.