t's glance.

"My old friend Owen!" cried Robert Danforth, starting up, and
compressing the artist's delicate fingers within a hand that was
accustomed to gripe bars of iron. "This is kind and neighborly to come
to us at last. I was afraid your perpetual motion had bewitched you out
of the remembrance of old times."

"We are glad to see you," said Annie, while a blush reddened her
matronly cheek. "It was not like a friend to stay from us so long."

"Well, Owen," inquired the old watchmaker, as his first greeting, "how
comes on the beautiful? Have you created it at last?"

The artist did not immediately reply, being startled by the apparition
of a young child of strength that was tumbling about on the carpet,--a
little personage who had come mysteriously out of the infinite, but
with something so sturdy and real in his composition that he seemed
moulded out of the densest substance which earth could supply. This
hopeful infant crawled towards the new-comer, and setting himself on
end, as Robert Danforth expressed the posture, stared at Owen with a
look of such sagacious observation that the mother could not help
exchanging a proud glance with her husband. But the artist was
disturbed by the child's look, as imagining a resemblance between it
and Peter Hovenden's habitual expression. He could have fancied that
the old watchmaker was compressed into this baby shape, and looking out
of those baby eyes, and repeating, as he now did, the malicious
question: "The beautiful, Owen! How comes on the beautiful? Have you
succeeded in creating the beautiful?"

"I have succeeded," replied the artist, with a momentary light of
triumph in his eyes and a smile of sunshine, yet steeped in such depth
of thought that it was almost sadness. "Yes, my friends, it is the
truth. I have succeeded."

"Indeed!" cried Annie, a look of maiden mirthfulness peeping out of her
face again. "And is it lawful, now, to inquire what the secret is?"

"Surely; it is to disclose it that I have come," answered Owen Warland.
"You shall know, and see, and touch, and possess the secret! For,
Annie,--if by that name I may still address the friend of my boyish
years,--Annie, it is for your bridal gift that I have wrought this
spiritualized mechanism, this harmony of motion, this mystery of
beauty. It comes late, indeed; but it is as we go onward in life, when
objects begin to lose their freshness of hue and our souls their
delicacy of perception, that the spi