"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:--