“Oh, I’m so glad to see you, Eddie,” she said.  “All of the family but me have gone to a party, and I’m so lonesome!  Besides, I, like everybody else in town, want a chance to congratulate you.”

“Congratulate?” he replied, with a shrug, as he took a seat beside her, under the roses, “Congratulate?  In their hearts they all despise me.”  Then with a smile,

“You see the blue devils have the upper hand of me tonight, Myra.”

“Well, they are fibbing devils if they tell you you are despised.  Dick Ambler was over at your house looking for you a little while ago, and he stopped by and told me about your swim.  He said he and the other boys that followed you in the boat had never seen anything so exciting in their lives.  They were expecting you to give out any minute and so much afraid that if you did you would go under before they could get hold of you.  When you won the wager they were so proud and happy that they were almost beside themselves.”

“Oh, I know Dick and the rest are the best and truest friends a fellow ever had—­bless their hearts—­but they are the exceptions.”

“Nonsense!  There’s not a boy in town tonight who would not give his head to be in your shoes, and” (shyly) “the girls are all wild about you.”

The hero smiled indulgently.  No woman was ever thrown with Edgar Poe, from his birth up, but in some fashion or degree, loved him, and to him all women were angels.  He never, as boy or man, entertained a thought or wrote a line of one of them that was not reverent.  He admired, in varying degree, all types of feminine loveliness, but Myra, though he liked her, was not the style that he most cared for.  He had always thought her too “washed out.”  The soul that shone through her rather prominent, light-blue eyes was too transparent, too easily read.  He found more interesting the richer-hued brunette type, and the complex nature that goes with it; the flashes of starlight, the softness and the warmth, of brown eyes; the mysteries that lie in the shadow of dusky lashes; the variety of rich, warm tones in chestnut and auburn tresses.

But Myra was a revelation to him tonight.  He had never dreamed that she could look so pretty—­so very pretty—­as she did now in her white dress, with the moonlight filtering through the foliage upon her fair hair and her face (turned full of liking and undisguised admiration upon him) and her lovely arms, bared to the elbow.  She had an ethereal, fairy-like appearance that was bewitching, and in his despondent mood, her frank praise was more than sweet.  Still his answer was as bitter as ever,

“Oh, well, what does it all amount to?  They would say the same of any acrobat in a circus whose joints were a bit more limber than those of the rest of his tribe.  That does not remove their contempt for me, personally.”

“I don’t feel contempt for you, Eddie,” she gently replied—­just breathing it.