"You will doubtless appreciate it then," spoke the naturalist, turning to her with pleasure apparent in both voice and manner. "Would you care to hear the lines?"
"Nothing would delight me so much, Uncle William."
How beautiful Adele looked with her golden hair; how delicate and pearly was her lovely neck; what sweet eyes were hers, blue as a sky full of sunshine. Doctor Raymond's glance dwelt upon her with admiration.
"What a lovely girl you are!" he exclaimed voluntarily. Adele colored with pleasure.
"I did not think that you saw beauty in anything but your butterflies," she said archly.
"Indeed I do. I am very susceptible to beauty in any form. But surely you also see beauty in this?" He handed her a frame in which was mounted a gorgeous Scarlet Admiral. "Is not this strikingly beautiful? Note with what a brilliant red the secondaries are bordered, and the velvety blackness of the fore wings. It is among the last of our hibernating butterflies to seek its winter quarters, and is most interesting in many ways."
"It is beautiful," cried Adele with enthusiasm. "Oh! it just makes me want to study butterflies too when I see such pretty ones."
"I do not wonder that the old Greeks used the butterfly as an emblem of the soul," commented the Lepidopterist, well pleased with her appreciation of the insect. "Even as the imago bursts from its chrysalis and, throwing aside the bonds that held it a lowly creeping thing to earth, mounts upward on gauzy wings, so the soul casts off its earth-bound body at length and also mounts upward on wings of hope. The symbol of the butterfly is found on all their tombs and monuments."
"It is a pretty thought," commented his niece sweetly, "but you don't know how anxious I am to hear about Sir Joseph Banks and The Emperor."
"To be sure," ejaculated Doctor Raymond hastily. "I had forgotten." Then, in a rich voice of no little charm, he recited the ode. Adele laughed merrily as he finished.