Page:A Girl of the Limberlost.djvu/275

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MOTHER LOVE IS BESTOWED
257

the remnants of the moths, burying them in the ashes of the stove. She took the bag to her room, hurriedly releasing its contents, but there was not another Yellow one. Her mother had said some had been confined in the case in the Limberlost. There was still a hope that an Emperor might be among them. She peeped at her mother, who still slept soundly.

Elnora took a large piece of mosquito netting, and ran to the swamp. Throwing it over the top of the case, she unlocked the door. She reeled, faint with distress. The living moths that had been confined there, in their fluttering to escape to night and the mates they sought, not only had wrecked the other specimens of the case, but torn themselves to ribbons on the pins. A third of the rarest moths of the collection for the man of India were antennæless, legless, wingless, and often headless. Elnora sobbed aloud.

At last she closed the door, dropped the netting, and sank on a log, staring before her with unseeing eyes, trying to think.

"This is overwhelming," she said at last. "It is making a fatalist of me. I am beginning to think things happen as they are ordained from the beginning, this plainly indicating that there is to be no college at least, this year, for me. My life is all mountain-top or cañon. I wish some one would lead me into a few days of 'green pastures.' Last night I went to sleep on mother's arm, the moths all secured, love and college, certainties. This morning I wake to find all my hopes wrecked. I simply