“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 this time, though the mother of Edgar’s twelve-year-old chum, not thirty years of age, and her pensive beauty was in its fullest flower.  Against the sombre background the arbor-vitae made, her slight figure, clad in soft, clinging white, seemed airy and sylphlike.  Her dark, curling hair, girlishly bound with a ribbon snood, and her large brown eyes, were in striking contrast to her complexion, which was pale, with the radiant and warm palor of a tea-rose or a pearl.  Her features were daintily modelled, and like slender lilies were the hands holding the deep blue plate from which the pigeons—­white, grey and bronze, fed—­fluttering about her with soft cooings.

The picture was so much more like a poet’s dream than a reality, that the boy-poet stepped back, with an exclamation of surprise.