his eggs.

Breitmann drew up his shoulders. "For the same reason that I am
renting my brains as a private secretary. It was the last thing I
could find, and still retain a little self-respect. My heart was dead
when the admiral told me he had already engaged a secretary. But your
note brought me the position."

"But the newspapers?"

"None of them will employ me."

"In New York, with your credentials?"

"Even so."

"I don't quite understand."

"It would take too long to explain."

"I can give you some letters."

"Thank you. It would be useless. Secretly and subterraneously, I have
had the bottom knocked out from under my feet. Why, God knows! But no
more of that. Some day I will give you my version."

The little man smiled over his butterfly, took out a wallet, something
on the pattern of a fisherman's, and put the new-found specimen into
one of the mica compartments, in which other dead butterflies of
variant beauty reposed.