The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams Page B

accepted it. “You’ve often talked me into a better comprehension of Damaris,” he said.
    â€œTheoretically,” Quentin sneered at himself.
    â€œWell, you can hardly tell that, can you?” Anthony argued. “If your intellect elucidated Da—— O damn!”
    The bell of the front door had suddenly sounded and Quentin shied violently, dropping his cigarette. “God curse it,” he cried out.
    â€œAll right,” Anthony said, “I’ll go. If it’s anyone we know I won’t let him in, and if it’s anyone we don’t know I’ll keep him out. There! Look after that cigarette!” He disappeared from the room, and it was some time before he returned.
    When he did so he was, in spite of his promise, accompanied. A rather short, thickset man, with a firm face and large eyes, was with him.
    â€œI changed my mind, after all,” Anthony said. “Quentin, this is Mr. Foster of Smetham, and he’s come to talk about the lion too. So he was good enough to come up.”
    Quentin’s habitual politeness, returning from wherever it hid during his intimacy with his friend, controlled him and said and did the usual things. When they were all sitting down, “And now let’s have it,” Anthony said. “Will you tell Mr. Sabot here what you have told me?”
    â€œI was talking to Miss Tighe this afternoon,” Mr. Foster said; he had a rough deep voice, Quentin thought, “and she told me that you gentlemen had been there two days ago—at Mr. Berringer’s house, I mean—when all this began. So in view of what’s happened since, I thought it would do no harm if we compared notes.”
    â€œWhen you say what’s happened since,” Anthony asked, “you mean the business at the meeting last night? I understood from Miss Tighe that one of the ladies there thought she saw a snake.”
    â€œI think—and she thinks—she did see a snake,” Mr. Foster answered. “As much as Mr. Tighe saw the butterflies this afternoon. You won’t deny them?”
    â€œButterflies?” Quentin asked, as Anthony shook his head, and then, with a light movement of it, invited Mr. Foster to explain.
    â€œMr. Tighe came in while I was at his house this afternoon,” the visitor said, “in a very remarkable state of exaltation. He told us—Miss Tighe and myself—that he had been shown that butterflies were really true. Miss Tighe was inclined to be a little impatient, but I prevailed on her to let him tell us—or rather he insisted on telling us—what he had seen. As far as I could follow, there had been one great butterfly into which the lesser ones had passed. But Mr. Tighe took this to be a justification of his belief in them. He was very highly moved, he quite put us on one side, which is (if I may say so) unusual in so quiet a man as he, and he would do nothing but go to his cabinets and look at the collection of his butterflies. I left him,” Mr. Foster ended abruptly, “on his knees, apparently praying to them.”
    Quentin had been entirely distracted by this tale from his own preoccupation. “ Prqying! ” he exclaimed. “But I don’t … Weren’t you with him, Anthony?”
    â€œI was up to a point,” Anthony said. “I was going to tell you later on, whenever it seemed convenient. Mr. Foster is quite right. It can’t possibly have been so, but we saw thousands and thousands of them all flying to one huge fellow in the middle, and then—well, then they weren’t there.”
    â€œSo Tighe said,” Mr. Foster remarked. “But why can’t it possibly have happened?”
    â€œBecause—because it can’t,” Anthony said. “Thousands of butterflies swallowed up in one, indeed!”
    â€œThere was Aaron’s rod,” Mr Foster put in, and for a moment perplexed both his hearers. Anthony, recovering