y, and yet
too close at hand to be quite desirable as a summer location for the
more prosperous. The island was of sufficient size to hold a couple of
real farms in the centre, while the shore line was occupied by
occasional villas. Halfway between these two mutually foreign regions,
on a sharp slope that still remained largely uncleared, stood a little
red house with just two rooms in it. One of these was occupied by the
old couple that owned the house. The other one had been rented to the
Wellanders for the summer, and in that one room the mother, the
grandmother and Keith established themselves, with the father appearing
as a regular week-end guest.

Taking it all in all, it was the freest, and in many ways the happiest
summer of Keith's childhood. He was permitted to roam around pretty much
as he pleased, and there were several other small boys to play with,
none of them enterprising enough to arouse the distrust of Keith's
mother. They were all city boys however, as foreign to nature as Keith,
and there was no older person on hand to give their excursions and games
a constructive twist without turning them into lessons. There was plenty
of wild life about, and it helped in many ways to give them a better
time, but that was as near as they got to it. Exactly the same thing
happened during subsequent summers, and so the boy always looked upon
flowers and trees and birds and insects as delightful but puzzling
representatives of a world of which he did not know the language.

It was good fun, however, and temporarily it took Keith farther away
from himself and from his cherished books than he had been since his
first discovery of the latter. The boys proved decent, wholesome
company, more bent on discharging their surplus energy than on doing
mischief. Much of their time was spent in or near the water, so that
Keith developed into a pretty good swimmer for his age, though always of
the cautious type. And between games they would discuss the world from
a boy's point of view. There was particularly one boy of the same age as
Keith with whom he had talks of a kind quite new to him. Oscar's parents
were still very young, and he spoke of them more as chums than as
masters. And he spoke of them with a sort of restrained enthusiasm that
set Keith thinking very hard. He loved his parents, especially his
mother, and admired them, especially his father at certain times, but he
was not conscious of any feeling about them corresp