When Ladybug regained consciousness and learned that the young man had been drowned, she said: "My lover is free. Hell cannot hold him. Human blood and water have atoned for his crime." This is the little speech she addressed to me that first morning. Then it had been put in the future tense.
Twelve months later a beggar gave Butterfly a hand of tobacco for his supper. While he ate she rolled the best leaf into me, placed me between her teeth, and left the room. Soon Ladybug entered, sounded a bell, as was her nightly custom, and waited.
In a few minutes a hideous form entered, smoking me.
"I am his mistress," said Ladybug, and seized the shape by the throat. The beggar, whom Ladybug had not seen, and whom Butterfly had forgotten, was present, and tried to separate them. In so doing he caused me to get entangled in the laces worn by the woman, communicating my fire to the flimsy garments. Now, the hideous form was Butterfly. Soon the clothing of both was ablaze, when they were darting about the room, the beggar trying to help first one and then the other. Both fell across the piano about the same time, and began to reach out, as if to clamber from the flames. In this way they played, as it were, their own dirge. When the sounds ceased they were dead. A mystery? Yes! No!
On the morning of the wedding-day a groom-to-be sailed out upon the lake. Said he to himself: "Christian people say that he who provides not for his household is worse than an infidel, and that a millstone had better be placed about his neck and be sunk into the sea. What have I for wife and children? Prosperity has passed me by. Friends are not friends. Fate is my executioner."
Three days after this his body was recovered and buried.
The preacher said to the people: "Suicide is an unpardonable sin. The young man, therefore, who was of noble birth and parentage, who was chaste in life and honorable in business, is in hell."
Ladybug, the dead man's fiancée, believed the rash-judging preacher. She soon lost her reason. Then came upon her the hallucinations that wrought the other tragedies. She believed that if her lover's twin brother, the young man of the fatal boat ride, would stand opposite the seed store for twenty days, and then perish as described in the boat ride, her lover would be released from hell and returned to her. Ladybug, among other hallucinations, believed that the number twenty held potent virtues; hence, the twenty days, twenty kisses, and the like. The lover was twenty years old, hence Ladybug's counting by twenties. The twin brother out of pity consented to humor her whim, not thinking it would cost him his life.