"I am sorry we did not stop," I said, half to myself, "I can't help feeling that was a moth."

There is where youth, in all its impetuosity, helped me. If the girl had asked, "Shall I go back?" in all probability I would have answered, "No, I must have been mistaken. Drive on!"

Instead, Molly-Cotton, who had straightened herself, and touched up her horse for a brisk entrance into town, said, "Well, we will just settle that 'feeling' right here!"

At a trot, she deftly cut a curve in the broad road and drove back. She drew close the edge of the ditch as we approached the lilies. As the horse stopped, what I had taken for a fallen lily bloom, suddenly opened to over five inches of gorgeous red-brown, canary-spotted wing sweep, and then closed again.

"It is a moth!" we gasped, with one breath.

Molly-Cotton cramped the wheel on my side of the carriage and started to step down. Then she dropped back to the seat.

"I am afraid," she said. "I don't want you to wade that ditch in the rain, but you never have had a red one, and if I bungle and let it escape, I never will forgive myself."