ce conveys an idea of her capacity
to restrain her destructive instinct, and be taught to believe that it
is wrong to kill birds for mere sport. For food she need not kill them,
seeing that Lily takes care that she has plenty to eat. But I don't
think that Mr. Melville had the slightest suspicion that he had
indicated that capacity in his picture."

"He must have done so, whether he suspected it or not," said Lily,
positively; "otherwise he would not be truthful."

"Why not truthful?" asked Kenelm.

"Don't you see? If you were called upon to describe truthfully the
character of any little child, would you only speak of such naughty
impulses as all children have in common, and not even hint at the
capacity to be made better?"

"Admirably put!" said Kenelm. "There is no doubt that a much fiercer
animal than a cat--a tiger, for instance, or a conquering hero--may be
taught to live on the kindest possible terms with the creatures on which
it was its natural instinct to prey."

"Yes, yes; hear that, aunty! You remember the Happy Family that we
saw eight years ago, at Moleswich fair, with a cat not half so nice as
Blanche allowing a mouse to bite her ear? Well, then, would Lion not
have been shamefully false to Blanche if he had not"--

Lily paused and looked half shyly, half archly, at Kenelm, then added,
in slow, deep-drawn tones--"given a glimpse of her innermost self?"

"Innermost self!" repeated Mrs. Cameron, perplexed and laughing gently.

Lily stole nearer to Kenelm and whispered,--

"Is not one's innermost self one's best self?"

Kenelm smiled approvingly. The fairy was rapidly deepening her spell
upon him. If Lily had been his sister, his betrothed, his wife, how
fondly he would have kissed her! She had expressed a thought over which
he had often inaudibly brooded, and she had clothed it with all the
charm of her own infantine fancy and womanlike tenderness. Goethe has
said somewhere, or is reported to have said, "There is something in
every man's heart, that, if you knew it, would make you hate him." What
Goethe said, still more what Goethe is reported to have said, is never
to be taken quite literally. No comprehensive genius--genius at once
poet and thinker--ever can be so taken. The sun shines on a dunghill.
But the sun has no predilection for a dunghill. It only comprehends a
dunghill as it does a rose. Still Kenelm had always regarded that loose
ray from Goethe's prodigal orb with an abhorrence most