And now see what a cunning trap the most innocent intentions may sometimes
set. There was a mirror in the sick-room purposely so placed that, with
the parlor door ajar, the watcher, but not the patient, could see into the
parlor, and could be seen from the parlor when sitting anywhere between
the mirror and the window beyond it. This window was the one that looked
into the side garden. Purposely, too, the lounge had been placed so as to
give and receive these advantages. A candle stood on the window's inner
ledge and was screened from the unseen bed, but shone outward through the
window and inward upon the mirror. The front door of the parlor opened
readily to anyone within or without who knew enough to use its two latches
at once, but neither within nor without to--the Baron, say--who did not
know.

Do you see it? As he lay awake on the lounge his eye was, of course, drawn
constantly to the mirror by the reflected light of the candle, and to its
images of the nodding watcher and of the window just beyond. So lying and
gazing, he had suddenly beheld that which brought him from the lounge in
an instant, net in hand, and tortured to find the front door--by which he
would have slipped out and around to the window--fastened! What he saw was
the moth--the moth so many years unseen. Now it sipped at the saucer of
sweet stuff, now hovered over it, now was lost in the dark, and now
fluttered up or slid down the pane, lured by the beam of the candle.

If he was not to lose it, there was but one thing to do. With his eyes
fixed, moth-mad, on the window, he glided in, passed the two sleepers, and
stealthily lifted the sash with one hand, the other poising the net. The
moth dropped under, the net swept after it, and the sash slipped and fell.
Mrs. Fontenette rose wildly, and when she saw first the old woman, half