with a troubled heart and misty
eyes. This wonderful friend of his was as kind as ever, yet he seemed
changed. It was clear that he had "something on his mind."

"Will you go swimming with me this evening, Eddie?" said Dick Ambler
one day when school was out.

"With all the pleasure in life," was the hearty response.

Dick went home to his dinner with a singing heart. If anything could
bring Edgar down from the clouds to his own level, surely it would be
bathing together. He certainly could not make poetry while diving and
swimming, naked, in the racing and tumbling falls of James River. A
merry battle with those energetic waters kept a fellow's wits as well as
his muscles fully occupied.

But even this attempt was a failure. If Edgar made any poetry while in
the water he did not mention it; but he was absent-minded and unsociable
all the way to the river and back--sky-gazing for curious cloud-forms,
listening for bird-notes and hunting wild-flowers, and talking almost
none at all.

In the water he seemed to wake up, and never dived with more grace, or
daring; but no sooner had they started on the way home than he was off
with his dreams again.

Rob Stanard was more successful in his attempts to interest his friend.
In spite of their intimacy at school and on the playground Edgar had up
to this time never visited the Stanard home. Rob had enlisted his
mother's sympathy in the orphan boy and she had suggested that he should
invite Edgar home with him some day. It now occurred to Rob that this
would be a good time to do so, and knowing his friend's fondness for
dumb animals, he offered his pets as an attraction--asking him to come
and see his pigeons and rabbits. His invitation was accepted with
alacrity.

Edgar had seen Rob's mother, but only at a distance. He knew her
reputation as one of the town beauties, but lovely women were not rare
in Richmond, and, beauty-worshipper though he was, he had never had any
especial curiosity in regard to Mrs. Stanard. He was altogether
unprepared for the vision that broke upon him.

Instead of going through the house, Rob had piloted him by way of a side
gate, directly into the walled garden, sweet and gay with roses, lilies
and other flowers of early June.

Mrs. Stanard, who took almost as much pleasure in her children's pets as
they did, was standing near a clump of arbor-vitae, holding in her hands
a "willow-ware" plate from which the pigeons were feeding. She was at
t