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 corresponding to the one displayed by Oscar, whose father, after all, was nothing but a captain on one of the small steam sloops running between the city and some of the surrounding islands.

Oscar was especially eloquent when he spoke of the love his parents had for each other.  He gave examples that seemed exaggerated to Keith, but nevertheless impressed him.  In return Keith boasted similarly of his own parents, and he meant every word he said, but always what he had to tell fell short of the pictures drawn by Oscar.

“You don’t understand,” cried Oscar one day when again they were debating this fascinating topic all by themselves.  “It’s all right for your mother to kiss your father when he leaves and when he returns, and to be looking for him all the time.  But that’s not enough.  That’s not the way my parents love each other.  And I don’t think your father cares so very much for your mother.  But my father is so much in love with my mother that he would like to eat what she has chewed!”

“No—­o!” protested Keith, rather appalled by the illustration used, and yet feeling as if he had beheld some undiscovered country.  There was a pause during which he stared incredulously at Oscar.