ines;
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."

But Kenelm did not talk on. They had now arrived at the garden-gate of
Mrs. Cameron's cottage, and the elder persons in advance paused at the
gate and walked with them to the house.

It was a long, low, irregular cottage, without pretension to
architectural beauty, yet exceedingly picturesque,--a flower-garden,
large, but in proportion to the house, with parterres in which the
colours were exquisitely assorted, sloping to the grassy margin of the
rivulet, where the stream expanded into a lake-like basin, narrowed
at either end by locks, from which with gentle sound flowed shallow
waterfalls. By the banks was a rustic seat, half overshadowed by the
drooping boughs of a vast willow.

The inside of the house was in harmony with the exterior,--cottage-like,
but with an unmistakable air of refinement about the rooms, even in the
little entrance-hall, which was painted in Pompeian frescos.

"Come and see my butterfly-cage," said Lily, whisperingly.

Kenelm followed her through the window that opened on the garden; and
at one end of a small conservatory, or rather greenhouse, was the
habitation of these singular favourites. It was as large as a small
room; three sides of it formed by minute wirework, with occasional
draperies of muslin or other slight material, and covered at intervals,
sometimes within, sometimes without, by dainty creepers; a tiny cistern
in the centre, from which upsprang a sparkling jet. Lily cautiously
lifted a sash-door and glided in, closing it behind her. Her entrance