XI

The summer was spent on the mainland opposite the island where they used to live.  He had practically no companionship except that of his mother.  It was very dull, but for the first time he seemed to need solitude.  He had brought out all his schoolbooks, and he really did a good deal of studying, especially of Latin, which he knew was his weakest point.

At first he felt a slight grudge against the mother.  She had disappointed him for one thing, and there was an inclination besides to hold her responsible for his misfortune.  By degrees, however, he began to see his own part in its true light, and he wondered how he could have been such a blind fool.  It was this understanding that brought him comparative peace and enabled him to work.  He had been so harassed by the question of guilt in regard to actions which his own mind would never have classed as wrong that the sense of facing punishment clearly deserved came as a genuine relief.

The monotony of the season was only broken by a visit to the summer home of Aunt Agda at Laurel Grove, where he stayed a whole week and made a lot of friends.  She had served with the Wellanders as a nurse girl when Keith was only a baby.  Then she was plain Agda, and Keith’s mother often spoke of how crazy she had been about him.  Then she disappeared, and when the Wellanders next heard of her, she was the wife of a well-to-do retired merchant, to whom she had borne three children while she was merely a servant and his first wife still lived.  Keith had often overheard his parents speak of Agda’s phenomenal rise with ironic smiles, but he didn’t care for anything except her continued inclination to spoil him.

There was a lot of children at Laurel Grove, boys and girls, and most of them matched Keith in age.  They took him in, and in that one week he had a glimpse of the kind of life he would have liked to live.  There was in particular one boy, Arnold Kruse, for whom Keith formed a warm attachment.  This feeling was additionally cemented by Arnold’s choice of Keith as a confidant.  Arnold was in love with the prettiest girl in the place, Gurlie Norlin, and so was every other boy within reach of Laurel Grove.  But Arnold was the favourite, and he told Keith that he and Gurlie had agreed to wait for each other and to marry as soon as they were of age.

It was like a fairy tale to Keith—­a wonderful tale like no one he had ever read.  And the most wonderful thing about it was that it was real, and that he was permitted to play a sort of part in it.  His thoughts went back to Oscar and what he had told Keith about the love between Oscar’s father and mother.  Here was love again, mystically beautiful, so that it brought a new light into the faces of those it touched.  And Keith’s heart grew lonely and wistful within him.  But strangely enough, he never thought of connecting Arnold’s love for Gurlie with what he had read in the book found in his father’s book case.  That was quite a different thing, he felt.