Aloud, he said, “She’s an angel!  She’s the one I’ve always dreamed about.”

“You dreamed about mother when you had never seen her?” questioned the astonished Rob.  “What did you dream?”

“Nothing, in the way you mean.  I meant she is like my idea of a perfect woman.  The kind of woman a man could always be good for, or would gladly die to serve.”

“Well, I’m not smart enough to think out things like that, Eddie, but Mother certainly is all right.  What you say about her sounds nice, and she’d understand it, too.  I just bet that you and mother’ll be the best sort of cronies when you know each other better.  She likes all those queer old books you think so fine, and she knows whole pages of poetry by heart.  When you and she get together it will be like two books talking out loud to each other.  I won’t be able to join in much, but it will be as good as a play to listen.”

The young poet bent his steps homeward with but one thought, one hope in his heart, and that a consuming one:  to look again upon the lovely face, to hear again the voice that had enthralled him, had taken his heart by storm and filled it with a veritable grande passion—­the rapturous devotion of the virgin heart of an ardent and romantic youth.  First love—­yet so much more than ordinary love—­a pure passion of the soul, in which there was much of worship and nothing of desire.  Surely the most pure and holy passion the world has ever known, for in it there was absolutely nothing of self.  Like Dante after his first meeting with Beatrice, this Virginia boy-poet had entered upon a Vita Nuova—­a new life—­made all of beauty.

What difference did the taunts of schoolmates, the hardness of a foster-father make now?  The wounds they made had been gratefully healed by the balm of her beauteous words about his mother.  Those old wounds were as nothing—­neither they nor anything else had power to harm him now.  In the new life that had opened so suddenly before him he would bear a charmed existence.

He went to his room before the usual hour that night, for he wanted to be alone with his dreams—­with his newest, most beautiful dream.  To his room, but not to bed.  Life was too beautiful to be wasted in sleep.  He lighted his lamp and holding his mother’s picture within its circle of light, gazed long and devotedly upon it.  Did she know of the great light that had shone out of what seemed a sunless sky upon her boy?  Had she, looking out from high Heaven, seen the gracious greeting of the beautiful being who was Madonna and Psyche in one?  Had she heard her own cause so sweetly championed, her own name so sweetly cleared of opprobrium?

He threw himself upon his lounge and lay with his hands clasped under his curly head, still dreaming—­dreaming—­dreaming—­until day-dreams were merged into real dreams, for he was fast asleep.