“I’m going to stay in the Willows all day,” said Lydia.  “Don’t go too fast, Kent.”

“Dit-up!  Dit-up, horsy!” screamed little Patience.

“Toot!  Toot!  Express for the Willows!” shouted Kent, mounting his wheel, and the procession was off, the perambulator bounding madly after the bicycle, while Patience shouted with delight and Lydia clung desperately to the handle-bars.

The path, after a few moments, shifted to the lake shore.  The water there lapped quietly on a sandy beach, deep shaded by willows.  Kent dismounted.

“Discharge your cargo!” he cried.

“Don’t be so bossy,” said Lydia.  “This is my party.”

“All right, then I won’t play with you.”

“Nobody asked you to, smarty.  I was going to give you my deviled egg for lunch.”

“Gosh,” said Kent, “did you bring your lunch?  Say, I guess I’ll go home and get mother to give me some.  But let’s play pirates, first.”

“All right!  I choose to be chief first,” agreed Lydia.

“And I’m the cannibal and baby’s the stolen princess,” said Kent.

The three children plunged into the game which is the common property of childhood.  For a time, bloody captures, savage orgies, escape, pursuit, looting of great ships and burial of treasure, transformed the quiet shore to a theater of high crime.  At last, as the August noon waxed high, and the hostage princess fell fast asleep in her perambulator cave, the cannibal, who had shifted to captured duke, bowed before the pirate.

“Sir,” he said in a deep voice, “I have bethought myself of still further treasure which if you will allow me to go after in my trusty boat, I will get and bring to you—­if you will allow me to say farewell at that time to my wife and babes.”

“Ha!” returned the pirate.  “How do I know you’ll come back?”

The duke folded his arms.  “You have my word of honor which never has, and never will, be broken.”

“Go, duke—­but return ere sundown.”  The pirate made a magnificent gesture toward the bicycle, “and, say Kent, bring plenty to fill yourself up, for I’m awful hungry and I’ll need all we’ve got.”

As Kent shot out of sight, Lydia turned to arrange the mosquito bar over little Patience, then she stood looking out over the lake.  The morning wind had died and the water lay as motionless and perfect a blue as the sky above.  Faint and far down the curving shore the white dome of the Capitol building rose above soft billows of green tree tops.  Up the shore, woods crowned the gentle slopes of the hills.  Across the lake lay a dim green shore-line of fields.  Lydia gave a deep sigh.  The beauty of the lake shore always stirred in her a wordless ecstasy.  She waded slowly to her waist into the water, then turned gently on her back and floated with her eyes on the sky.  Its depth of color was no deeper nor more crystal clear than the depths of her own blue gaze.  The tender brooding wonder of the lake was a part and parcel of her own little face, so tiny in the wide expanse of water.