at our friend Owen has wasted on this
butterfly."

Here the child clapped his hands and made a great babble of indistinct
utterance, apparently demanding that the butterfly should be given him
for a plaything.

Owen Warland, meanwhile, glanced sidelong at Annie, to discover whether
she sympathized in her husband's estimate of the comparative value of
the beautiful and the practical. There was, amid all her kindness
towards himself, amid all the wonder and admiration with which she
contemplated the marvellous work of his hands and incarnation of his
idea, a secret scorn--too secret, perhaps, for her own consciousness,
and perceptible only to such intuitive discernment as that of the
artist. But Owen, in the latter stages of his pursuit, had risen out of
the region in which such a discovery might have been torture. He knew
that the world, and Annie as the representative of the world, whatever
praise might be bestowed, could never say the fitting word nor feel the
fitting sentiment which should be the perfect recompense of an artist
who, symbolizing a lofty moral by a material trifle,--converting what
was earthly to spiritual gold,--had won the beautiful into his
handiwork. Not at this latest moment was he to learn that the reward of
all high performance must be sought within itself, or sought in vain.
There was, however, a view of the matter which Annie and her husband,
and even Peter Hovenden, might fully have understood, and which would
have satisfied them that the toil of years had here been worthily
bestowed. Owen Warland might have told them that this butterfly, this
plaything, this bridal gift of a poor watchmaker to a blacksmith's
wife, was, in truth, a gem of art that a monarch would have purchased
with honors and abundant wealth, and have treasured it among the jewels
of his kingdom as the most unique and wondrous of them all. But the
artist smiled and kept the secret to himself.

"Father," said Annie, thinking that a word of praise from the old
watchmaker might gratify his former apprentice, "do come and admire
this pretty butterfly."

"Let us see," said Peter Hovenden, rising from his chair, with a sneer
upon his face that always made people doubt, as he himself did, in
everything but a material existence. "Here is my finger for it to
alight upon. I shall understand it better when once I have touched it."

But, to the increased astonishment of Annie, when the tip of her
father's finger was pressed against