Luncheon over, while Mrs. Cameron wrote her reply to Elsie, Kenelm was conducted by Lily into her own own room, in vulgar parlance her boudoir, though it did not look as if any one ever bouder’d there. It was exquisitely pretty,—pretty not as a woman’s, but as a child’s dream of the own own room she would like to have,—wondrously neat and cool, and pure-looking; a trellis paper, the trellis gay with roses and woodbine, and birds and butterflies; draperies of muslin, festooned with dainty tassels and ribbons; a dwarf bookcase, that seemed well stored, at least as to bindings; a dainty little writing-table in French marqueterie, looking too fresh and spotless to have known hard service. The casement was open, and in keeping with the trellis paper; woodbine and roses from without encroached on the window-sides, gently stirred by the faint summer breeze, and wafted sweet odours into the little room. Kenelm went to the window, and glanced on the view beyond. “I was right,” he said to himself; “I divined it.” But though he spoke in a low inward whisper, Lily, who had watched his movements in surprise, overheard.
“You divined it. Divined what?”
“Nothing, nothing; I was but talking to myself.”
“Tell me what you divined: I insist upon it!” and Fairy petulantly stamped her tiny foot on the floor.
“Do you? Then I obey. I have taken a lodging for a short time on the other side of the brook,—Cromwell Lodge,—and seeing your house as I passed, I divined that your room was in this part of it. How soft here is the view of the water! Ah! yonder is Izaak Walton’s summer-house.”
“Don’t talk about Izaak Walton, or I shall quarrel with you, as I did with Lion when he wanted me to like that cruel book.”
“Who is Lion?”
“Lion,—of course, my guardian. I called him Lion when I was a little child. It was on seeing in one of his books a print of a lion playing with a little child.”
“Ah! I know the design well,” said Kenelm, with a slight sigh. “It is from an antique Greek gem. It is not the lion that plays with the child, it is the child that masters the lion, and the Greeks called the child ‘Love.’”
This idea seemed beyond Lily’s perfect comprehension. She paused before she answered, with the naivete of a child six years old,—