What a nice letter, thought Jimmy drowsily. He had forgotten the killing bottle. I won’t show it to Randolph, Jimmy thought, unless he asks me.

But soon after breakfast a footman brought him a message: Mr. Verdew was in his room and would be glad to see the invention (the man’s voice seemed to put the word into inverted commas) at Mr. Rintoul’s convenience. ‘Well,’ reflected Jimmy, ‘if he’s to see it working it must have something to work on.’ Aimlessly he strolled over the drawbridge and made his way, past blocks of crumbling wall, past grassy hummocks and hollows, to the terraces. They were gay with flowers; and looked at from above, the lateral stripes and bunches of colour, succeeding each other to the bottom of the hill, had a peculiarly brilliant effect. What should he catch? A dozen white butterflies presented themselves for the honour of exhibiting their death-agony to Mr. Randolph Verdew, but Jimmy passed them by. His collector’s pride demanded a nobler sacrifice. After twenty minutes’ search he was rewarded; his net fell over a slightly battered but still recognizable specimen of the Large Tortoiseshell butterfly. He put it in a pill-box and bore it away to the house. But as he went he was visited by a reluctance, never experienced by him before, to take the butterfly’s life in such a public and coldblooded fashion; it was not a good specimen, one that he could add to his collection; it was just cannon-fodder. The heat of the day, flickering visibly upwards from the turf and flowers, bemused his mind; all around was a buzzing and humming that seemed to liberate his thoughts from contact with the world and give them the intensity of sensations. So vivid was his vision, so flawless the inner quiet from which it sprang, that he came up with a start against his own bedroom door. The substance of his day-dream had been forgotten; but it had left its ambassador behind it—something that whether apprehended by the mind as a colour, a taste, or a local inflammation, spoke with an insistent voice and always to the same purpose: ‘Don’t show Randolph Verdew the butterfly; let it go, here, out of the window, and send him an apology.’

For a few minutes, such was the force of this inward monitor, Jimmy did contemplate setting the butterfly at liberty. He was prone to sudden irrational scruples and impulses, and if there was nothing definite urging him the other way he often gave in to them. But in this case there was. Manners demanded that he should accede to his host’s request; the rules of manners, of all rules in life, were the easiest to recognize and the most satisfactory to act upon. Not to go would be a breach of manners.

‘How kind of you,’ said Randolph, coming forward and shaking Jimmy’s hand, a greeting that, between two members of the same household, struck him as odd. ‘You have brought your invention with you?’

Jimmy saw that it was useless to disclaim the honour of its discovery. He unwrapped the bottle and handed it to Randolph.

Randolph carried it straight away to a high window, the sill of which was level with his eyes and above the top of Jimmy’s head. He held the bottle up to the light. Oblong in shape and about the size of an ordinary jam jar, it had a deep whitish pavement of plaster, pitted with brown furry holes like an overripe cheese. Resting on the plaster, billowing and coiling up to the glass stopper, stood a fat column of cotton-wool. The most striking thing about the bottle was the word poison printed in large, loving characters on a label stuck to the outside.

‘May I release the stopper?’ asked Randolph at length.

‘You may,’ said Jimmy, ‘but a whiff of the stuff is all you want.’

Randolph stared meditatively into the depths of the bottle. ‘A rather agreeable odour,’ he said. ‘But how small the bottle is. I had figured it to myself as something very much larger.’

‘Larger?’ echoed Jimmy. ‘Oh, no, this is quite big enough for me. I don t need a mausoleum.’

‘But I was under the impression,’ Randolph Verdew remarked, still fingering the bottle, ‘that you used it to destroy pests.’

‘If you call butterflies pests,’ said Jimmy, smiling.

‘I am afraid that some of them must undeniably be included in that category,’ pronounced Mr. Verdew, his voice edged with a melancholy decisiveness. ‘The cabbage butterfly, for instance. And it is, of course, only the admittedly noxious insects that need to be destroyed.’

‘All insects are more or less harmful,’ Jimmy said.

Randolph Verdew passed his hand over his brow. The shadow of a painful thought crossed his face, and he murmured uncertainly:

‘I think that’s a quibble. There are categories . . . I have been at some pains to draw them up. . . . The list of destructive lepidoptera is large, too large. . . . That is why I imagined your lethal chamber would be a vessel of considerable extent, possibly large enough to admit a man, and its use attended by some danger to an unpractised exponent.’

‘Well,’ said Jimmy, ‘there’s enough poison here to account for half a town. But let me show you how it works.’ And he took the pill-box from his pocket. Shabby, battered and cowed, the butterfly stood motionless, its wings closed and upright.

‘Now,’ said Jimmy, ‘you’ll see.’

The butterfly was already between the fingers and half-way to the bottle, when he heard, faint but clear, the sound of a cry. It was twosyllabled, like the interval of the cuckoo’s call inverted, and might have been his own name.

‘Listen!’ he exclaimed. ‘What was that? It sounded like Mrs. Verdew’s voice.’ His swiftly turning head almost collided with his host’s chin, so near had the latter drawn to watch the operation, and chased the tail-end of a curious look from Randolph Verdew’s face.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Go on.’

Alas, alas, for the experiment in humane slaughter! The butterfly must have been stronger than it looked; the power of the killing bottle had no doubt declined with frequent usage. Up and down, round and round flew the butterfly; its frantic flutterings could be heard through the thick walls of its glass prison. It clung to the cotton-wool, pressed itself into corners, its straining, delicate tongue coiling and uncoiling in the effort to suck in a breath of living air. Now it was weakening. It fell from the cotton-wool and lay with its back on the plaster slab. It jolted itself up and down and, when strength for this movement failed, it clawed the air with its thin legs as though pedalling an imaginary bicycle. Suddenly, with a violent spasm, it gave birth to a thick cluster of yellowish eggs. Its body twitched once or twice and at last lay still.

Jimmy shrugged his shoulders in annoyance and turned to his host. The look of horrified excitement whose vanishing vestige he had seen a moment before, lay full and undisguised upon Randolph Verdew’s face. He only said:

‘Of what flower or vegetable is that dead butterfly the parasite?’

‘Oh, poor thing,’ said Jimmy carelessly, ‘it’s rather a rarity. Its caterpillar may have eaten an elm-leaf or two—nothing more. It’s too scarce to be a pest. It’s fond of gardens and frequented places, the book says—rather sociable, like a robin.’

‘It could not be described as injurious to human life?’

‘Oh, no. It’s a collector’s specimen really. Only this is too damaged to be any good.’

‘Thank you for letting me see the invention in operation,’ said Randolph Verdew, going to his desk and sitting down. Jimmy found his silence a little embarrassing. He packed up the bottle and made a rather awkward, self-conscious exit.

The four bedroom candles always stood, their silver flashing agreeably, cheek by jowl with the whisky decanter and the hot-water kettle and the soda. Now, the others having retired, there were only two, one of which (somewhat wastefully, for he still had a half-empty glass in his hand) Rollo was lighting.