“It is a very poetical idea, Miss Mordaunt, and founded on evidence quite as rational as other assertions of the metamorphosis of one creature into another.  Perhaps you can do what the philosophers cannot—­tell me how you learned a new idea to be an incontestable fact?”

“I don’t know,” replied Lily, looking very much puzzled:  “perhaps I learned it in a book, or perhaps I dreamed it.”

“You could not make a wiser answer if you were a philosopher.  But you talk of taking care of butterflies:  how do you do that?  Do you impale them on pins stuck into a glass case?”

“Impale them!  How can you talk so cruelly?  You deserve to be pinched by the fairies.”

“I am afraid,” thought Kenelm, compassionately, “that my companion has no mind to be formed; what is euphoniously called ‘an innocent.’”

He shook his head and remained silent.

Lily resumed—­“I will show you my collection when we get home—­they seem so happy.  I am sure there are some of them who know me—­they will feed from my hand.  I have only had one die since I began to collect them last summer.”

“Then you have kept them a year; they ought to have turned into fairies.”

“I suppose many of them have.  Of course I let out all those that had been with me twelve months—­they don’t turn to fairies in the cage, you know.  Now I have only those I caught this year, or last autumn; the prettiest don’t appear till the autumn.”

The girl here bent her uncovered head over the straw hat, her tresses shadowing it, and uttered loving words to the prisoner.  Then again she looked up and around her, and abruptly stopped and exclaimed:—­

“How can people live in towns—­how can people say they are ever dull in the country?  Look,” she continued, gravely and earnestly—­“look at that tall pine-tree, with its long branch sweeping over the water; see how, as the breeze catches it, it changes its shadow, and how the shadow changes the play of the sunlight on the brook:—­

     ’Wave your tops, ye pines;
      With every plant, in sign of worship wave.’

What an interchange of music there must be between Nature and a poet!”

Kenelm was startled.  This “an innocent!”—­this a girl who had no mind to be formed!  In that presence he could not be cynical; could not speak of Nature as a mechanism, a lying humbug, as he had done to the man poet.  He replied gravely:—­

“The Creator has gifted the whole universe with language, but few are the hearts that can interpret it.  Happy those to whom it is no foreign tongue, acquired imperfectly with care and pain, but rather a native language, learned unconsciously from the lips of the great mother.  To them the butterfly’s wing may well buoy into heaven a fairy’s soul!”

When he had thus said, Lily turned, and for the first time attentively looked into his dark soft eyes; then instinctively she laid her light hand on his arm, and said in a low voice, “Talk on—­talk thus; I like to hear you.”