Some persons said that Keith looked like his father, others that he was the very image of his mother.

"He has my light hair and Carl's brown eyes," said his mother often when that topic was under discussion, and saying it seemed to make her happy.

"As a baby he was so pretty that people would stop us on the street to ask whose child he was," Granny might put in, if she happened to be within hearing. Then she would add with a glance at Keith: "But that is all gone now."

Keith himself never gave much thought to his looks, but any comparison with his mother struck him as quite foolish.

He liked to look at her, especially at her hair, which was very plentiful and in colour like beaten copper with glints of gold in it. Her skin was very fair and soft as the softest velvet. Her eyes were blue, and in bright moments they had the softness of the sky of a Swedish summer night. But when the clouds of depression closed in upon her, they grew pale and light less and disturbingly furtive, so that Keith's glance found it hard to meet them.

Her gaiety sparkled when she was herself, and she had a passionate love of everything that was bright and pleasant. Once she had always been that way and at times she would tell Keith what a wonderful time she had as a girl, and how she used to be the centre and inspiration of every social gathering in which she took part. She had a quick mind, too, and a heart full of impulsive generosity. But from one extreme she would go to another, so that, when the dark moments came, she would even regret kindnesses conferred while the sun was still shining. In such moments she would sometimes speak to the boy of her ailment as if he were in some mysterious way responsible for it.

Yet she loved the boy to distraction and became filled with unreasoning anxiety the moment he was out of sight. Her attitude toward her husband was the same. He could never leave the home or return to it without being kissed. The moment he was outside the kitchen door, she hastened to the window and leaned out of it so that she might watch him until he vanished about the corner at the head of the lane. And there she generally lay waiting for him when he came home. If he was late, which happened almost every day, she would be the victim of a thousand fears as she made more and more frequent trips between the kitchen and the living-room window. When he finally came, she acted as if she had not seen him for months while he pretended to be more or less bored by her attentions.

But there were moments, too, when her tenderness flared into startling outbursts of bleak, cutting anger, giving way in the end to floods of hysterical tears. A couple of such tempests formed part of Keith's earliest reliable memories.

As a rule Keith slept far too soundly to be aroused by anything. One night, however, there was so much loud talking in the room that he woke up completely. For a while he lay quite still, but with wide-open eyes and ears.

The big lamp had been placed on the washstand back of the chaiselongue on which he was lying, evidently in order to prevent its light from falling on his face.

His mother was seated, fully dressed, on the edge of the bed across the room. Her face was white as snow. Her eyes blazed with a sort of cold fire. Her whole body seemed to tremble with a feeling so tense that he could not find words for it.

The father was leaning far backwards on an ordinary chair, with his outstretched right arm resting on the dining table. His face was flushed and the thick fringe of black hair about the bald top of his head was slightly disordered. He tried to smile, but the smile turned into a grin. When he spoke, his voice was a little thick.

"I can't keep entirely away from my comrades." he said. "They think already that I am too stuck up to associate with them. I haven't been out for two weeks. I haven't had a drop more tonight than I can stand. And it isn't twelve o'clock yet."

All of a sudden Keith saw the cold, angry light go out of his mother's eyes. Her face twisted convulsively. She sank into a heap on the bed, sobbing as if her heart would break then and there.

"Carl," she screamed between two sobs. "You'll kill me if you talk like that to me!"

"Like that," he repeated in a stunned toneless voice. Then his face flushed almost purple. A hard look came into his eyes, and he rose so abruptly that the chair upset behind him. At the same time he brought down his fist with such violence that the table nearly toppled over.

"I'll be damned if I stand this kind of thing one moment longer," he shouted hoarsely.

But even as he spoke, his eyes fell on the boy. As if by magic, his self-control returned.

"The boy is awake," he said in his usual tone of stern reserve.

There was a moment's silence. A few more sobs came from the mother. Then she sat up, wiped her eyes, and spoke in a tone that was almost calm:

"Go to sleep again, Keith. Your father and I were merely talking about some things that you don't understand yet."

When she saw that the boy was crying, she came over to him, kneeled down beside him and put her arms about him. Soon her kisses and her soothing words had their wonted effect, and he dropped off once more into the deep, deathlike slumber of childhood.

The air remained tense in the household for several days, but nothing further happened until one night when the father arrived a little later than usual from his work, looking just as he did the night of the quarrel. Again his speech was a little thick, and the mother's face assumed an ominous look. She said nothing about what was nearest her heart, however, she started instead to complain of some petty disobedience on the part of Keith.

"If you spanked him a little more and humoured him la little less, he would obey more readily," said the father.

His words carried no particular menace, and there seemed no reason why the boy should be scared. But perhaps there was something else in the atmosphere that affected his sensitive nerves and sent him unexpectedly into a paroxysm of weeping.

"Stop it," cried his father dark with sudden anger. "Stop it, I tell you."

"You leave the boy alone," cried the mother, her face as white as the father's was red.

"We'll see whether he'll obey or not!"

As he spoke, the father sat down on the nearest chair, picked up the boy and put him face down across his knees.

Keith's heart seemed to stop. He even ceased weeping. Then he heard his mother cry out:

"If you touch the boy, I'll throw myself out of the window!"

"Oh, hell!" came back from the father. With that he half dropped and half flung the boy to the floor, so that the latter rolled across the room and landed under the chaiselongue.

There Keith lay, still as a mouse, until he was pulled out by his mother. He didn't begin to cry again, and he was no longer scared or upset. A few moments later he was undressing and going to bed as if nothing had happened.

Another week had hardly passed, when Keith was waked up again at night, but this time by a noise as if the house was falling. As he sat up in bed, staring wildly about him, his nostrils became filled with a smell that was quite new to him. It was like smoke, but more pungent.

The living-room was dark, but the door to the parlour stood open, and light came through it. Not a sound could be heard for a few moments.

Then his mother came running into the room and flung herself on her knees beside the chaiselongue.

"Oh, my boy, my boy, my boy!" she cried over and over again as she pressed Keith to her breast, rocking him back and forth.

A few seconds later the father also came in carrying the lamp in one hand. Having put it on the dining table, he dropped down on a chair as if too exhausted to stand up.

His face showed a pallor quite strange to it and for the first and only time in his life Keith thought that his father looked scared.

"Don't, Anna," the father said after a while, sitting up straight on the chair. "It's all right now--"

Then a thought or a memory seemed to recur to him, and he said in a voice that nearly broke:

"God, but it was a close call for both of us! And if it had happened to you, I would have followed you on the spot!"

"Carl, Carl!" cried the mother, letting Keith go and throwing her arms about her husband instead. "What would have become of Keith?"

It was the first time the boy was taken into his parents' confidence to some extent. He was still too young to grasp all the implications, but the main facts were plain enough even to him.

The parlour was rented as usual, but the man occupying it was not at home. The parents had gone in there together on some errand. Seeing a small pistol hanging on the wall above the big sofa, the father took it down and began to play with it, never for a moment suspecting it of being loaded.

First he pointed it at himself, then at Keith's mother. Each time he was about to pull the trigger, and each time something seemed to hold him back. Finally he turned the weapon toward the wall and pressed down with his finger. As he did so, the shot rang out that waked the boy.

The next day Keith was permitted to examine the mark made by the bullet in the wall. It was all very exciting. But the final result of that incident was as unforeseen as the shot itself.

The whole affair evidently made a deep impression on Keith's father. He ceased almost completely to go out by himself at night. In fact he became so averse to leaving his home that it was hard to get him out when the mother wanted him to go. And never again did Keith hear his parents quarrel openly.

But now and then when his father came home from work, Keith would notice that same slight thickness of speech which had forced itself on his attention on two extraordinary occasions.

He was a man himself before he realized what that thickness signified in his father's life.

"Oh, mamma, you mustn't!" cried Keith's mother one day when she came out into the kitchen and found the boy munching a slice of white bread with butter on it.

"He likes it so much," replied Granny easily.

"But you know what Carl has said," the mother rejoined rather impatiently. "He'll find out sooner or later if you disregard it, and then he'll be furious."

"So he will anyhow," muttered Granny.

"Mamma!" protested the mother. "It's for the boy's own good. He should only eat hard bread except on Sundays and when we have company. It is much better for his teeth. And it makes him stronger too. You want to be big and strong, don't you Keith?"

"It's a wonder his father lets him have anything at all to eat," Granny put in before Keith had a chance to answer.

"You must not talk like that, mamma," said the mother sharply. "Least of all when the boy hears it." Then she turned to Keith again: "Don't you believe what Granny says. Your father is merely thinking of what is good for you. He loves you just as much as I do--or your grandmother. But he thinks we are spoiling you. And he wants you to grow up and be a real man. That's why he hates to see you cry."

There was a pause while Keith pondered the matter--not seriously concerned on the whole, as long as the tidbit was not taken away from him.

"Don't you love your father," his mother asked suddenly.

"Ye-es," Keith answered mechanically.

Then he began to ponder again. His feelings toward his father were far too complicated for utterance. They seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with love, if that was what he felt for his mother. There was undoubtedly a great deal of fear in his attitude toward the father, and also resentment that at times would flare into something bordering on hatred. But this attitude was combined with a lot of respect, not to say admiration. At times it would also be tinged with a longing that he could not explain or express. And if ever the father gave him the slightest evidence of friendliness, he would be thrown into a rapture of happiness that nothing done by his mother could equal.

He adored his mother, and clung to her, and relied on her and wheedled her, but it was an open question whether, at heart, he felt any particular respect for her--although he was quite proud of certain things about her. And as for Granny, whom, in a way, he loved more than anybody else, because she petted him and indulged his slightest whims, there could simply be no talk about respecting her. Even Keith realized that she was not in the respected class.

His father was, on the other hand. There could be no doubt about that. If he had only been willing to unbend a little now and then....

The kitchen had other attractions than Granny, though she ranked foremost.

As Keith came out from the living-room, he had on his right the huge, old-fashioned fire-place--a regular fortress of brick, with a modern cook stove of iron set into one corner of it. It was entirely covered by a smoke-hood of painted metal sheeting, with a flange on its outside edge along which were placed a number of lids.

On his left was a set of shelves filled from top to bottom with pots and pans and kettles of every possible size and shape, including a cauldron so huge and heavy that it took two people to get it out with ease from its place on the bottom shelf. An overwhelming majority of these utensils were of copper and so highly polished that they shone like suns setting through a fog bank. Some of them made good toys, but "things for use and not for play" was an old maxim often quoted by both parents and grudgingly repeated by Granny herself.

A big sofa, in which the grandmother slept at night stood along the centre of the wall on the left. The corner beyond held a wall-fast cupboard so large that it looked like a closet built into the room. It serves both as pantry and buffet, and was full of things tempting to a young palate.

In the opposite corner, beyond the window and right by the outside door, stood an open water barrel holding about twenty gallons. There was no running water above the ground floor. Every drop had to be carried three flights of stairs from the courtyard. What was needed for drinking and cooking was kept in a copper can, two feet high, with a lid on top and a spout in front that made it look like a badly overgrown tea kettle. Water for all other uses had to come out of the barrel. To keep both vessels filled was a heavy task, and waste of water was regarded as little short of a crime. The sacredness of the barrel and its contents was a mystery to Keith until he grew old enough to do some of the carrying. Then he began to understand.

Most of the water went to the stove, where operations of one kind or another were carried on from morning till night, tempting the boy with their mysteries or their promises. In the uppermost corner of the hood was a square opening covered by an iron lid. When the lid was down and you crawled right up into the fire-place, you could see the sky through the chimney.

One day, when Keith had sneaked into the kitchen uninvited, he noticed something unusual going on in the fire-place. All the paraphernalia had been cleared away. The lid was open, and from the chimney issued strange noises. Then soot began to fall in masses, and finally appeared a pair of human feet, quite bare and all black.

It was very funny and very disconcerting. Keith watched with bulging eyes and trembling heart, until at last a whole big man came out of the chimney. As he crouched for a moment on the fire-place before getting down on the floor, he turned on Keith a pair of eyes that seemed to be all white and big as moons.

At that moment fear got the better of curiosity, and Keith made haste to bury his face in Granny's lap.

"Yes, Keith had better look out," grinned the servant girl, "for the chimney sweep takes all bad little boys."

"I'll take you, if you talk like that," the black figure in the fire-place shot back at her.

The tone of his voice made Keith steal another glance at him. The white eyes shone right at him in a rather friendly fashion, and further down a huge red slit in the black face framed two rows of teeth no less white than the eyes. Keith guessed that the dark visitor from the chimney was smiling at him in a fashion that seemed to bode no harm.

In another minute the man was gone, and Keith hurried back to the living-room to ask a question of his mother:

"Could he really take me?"

"Not unless we gave him leave," she replied. "But sometimes, when little boys are very, very bad, their parents turn them over to the sweep as apprentices, because they are not good for anything else."

Keith thought long and hard.

"I ain't bad," he declared at last.

"Not exactly," his mother remarked diplomatically "But you could be a great deal better. What were you doing in the kitchen just now? I have told you not to run out there all the time. Lena does not like you to get in her way, you know."

"But Granny is there," Keith protested.

"Yes, of course, and you must be nice to her, but...."

As his mother did not go on, Keith asked: "Why does Granny always stay in the kitchen?"

"Because she wants to," his mother answered.

"But why does she want to?"

"It is her way--a sort of pride she has. And I have long ago given up trying to persuade her."

Her tone indicated clearly that further discussion of the subject was not desirable.

Keith was playing in his own corner that very evening, trying to keep as quiet as possible while his father had an unusually late dinner. His mother had gone out into the kitchen a few moments earlier. Thence she returned suddenly with a half empty bottle in her hand and a look of extreme annoyance on her face.

"Carl," she said, "look what I just found in a corner of the cupboard."

"Humph," the father grunted with a sideglance at the bottle. "Ours is locked up, is it not?"

"Yes, but that is neither here nor there. She would rather die, she says, than touch a drop of ours."

"Where does she get it?"

"I can't make it out. Somebody must bring it in, of course. I fear it is Mrs. Karlgren, and I am simply going to tell her to keep away hereafter. The idea of her coming here practically begging, and then doing such a thing, after all I have done for her!"

"But you are not sure," the father objected earnestly, and Keith paid special notice to his objection because he had already learned, or divined, that his father could not bear the sight of the poor woman in question.

"No, it is impossible to be sure," the mother admitted. Then she added after a pause: "What puzzles me more than anything else is where she gets the money."

Though no name was mentioned, Keith knew perfectly well that they were speaking of Granny. And he recalled having laughed at her in the kitchen earlier in the evening before the father came home. Her eyes had a funny look and seemed a little inflamed. Her still thick braids were loosened and about to come entirely undone. She was talking more than usual and in a tone that suggested defiance.

As he recalled all this, Keith forgot to listen to his parents, who went on discussing so intently that he was able to leave his corner and reach the door to the kitchen unnoticed. An irresistible desire to see Granny at once had seized him. Back of it lay a vaguely sensed mixture of curiosity and sympathy.

Granny was in her favourite place beside the kitchen sofa, seated on a footstool almost as large as an ordinary chair, but somewhat lower. That stool was the one bone of contention between her and Keith, because he was carrying it off as often as he could get at it. Turned upside down, with Keith seated snugly between its four legs, it became a sleigh drawn across icy plains by a team of swift reindeer, or a ship rocking mightily on the high seas.

The kitchen was full of a peculiar sweetish smell, by which Keith knew without looking that Granny was dressing the old wound on her left leg that had developed "the rose" and would not heal. She was leaning far over, busy with a bandage which she wound tightly about her leg, from the ankle to the knee. The boy sniffed the familiar smell with a vague sense of discomfort, which, however, did not prevent him from going up to the grandmother and putting one arm about her neck.

"Old hurt is hard to mend," she muttered quoting one of the old saws always on her lips. Then without raising her head, she added in the peevish, truculent tone of a thwarted child: "You had better go back in there before they come and get you. I am nothing but a servant, and as such I know my place and keep it. I am less than a servant, for they wouldn't dare do to Lena what they do to me."

"Oh, yes, they would," Lena put in from across the room. "And they would have a right, too."

As if she had not heard at all, Granny sat up straight and looked hard at the boy.

"Whatever you do, Keith," she said, and he noticed that her voice sounded a little strange, "see that you make a lot of money when you grow up. To be poor is to have no rights, and the worst thing of all is to be dependent on others, no matter how near they are to you."

"I think Mrs. Carlsson is very ungrateful," said Lena. "There are thousands of old people who would give anything to have a nice home and nothing to worry over."

"Anybody can talk, but it takes a head to keep silent," said Granny impersonally, quoting another old saw. Then her manner changed abruptly and she turned to Keith effusively.

"Give me a kiss! You love your old Granny, don't you? You don't despise her, do you, because she has nothing and is nothing? And can be sure she loves you more than anybody else."

The boy's feelings were so mixed that he really could not feel anything at all. His arm was still about the grandmother's neck, mechanically he gave her the kiss she asked for, but it was with real relief he saw his mother open the door to the living-room and responded to her demand that he go to bed at once.

Hardly any memory left behind by Keith's childhood was more acute than the image of Granny seated in the centre of the kitchen, her stolid, yet pleasant old face bent over some household task, and her whole figure instinct with a passive protest against her enforced dependency or, maybe against life's arbitrariness in general. One moment she seemed to be brooding deeply, and the next she looked as if there was not a thought in her head. For one reason or another, her anomalous position and peculiar attitude occupied Keith's mind a great deal, and many of the questions with which he plied his mother were concerned with Granny. They were fairly discreet as a rule, but on the morning after the scene just described, some impulse of which he had no clear understanding made him perplex his mother with the abrupt question:

"Why does Granny drink?"

They were alone in the living-room at the time, she seated in her big easy chair by the window and he, as usual, kneeling on the hassock at her feet.

She looked up at him with as much surprise as if he had hit her viciously. A deeper red flowed into her cheeks that kept their soft pinkness even when she was thought at death's door and lost it only under the pressure of extreme anger.

At the same time a look came into her eyes that gave Keith a momentary scare. It was only a flash, however, and changed quickly into something like the helplessness that used to characterize her glance in moments of heavy depression. Her voice trembled a little as she spoke:

"Because Granny's life has been very hard, and not very happy."

"Tell me about it," urged the boy.

There was a long pause during which he watched his mother's face closely. Gradually its expression changed into one of resignation, and then into determination, as if she had made up her mind to be done once for all with a task that could not be avoided indefinitely. It was a long story she told, at first hesitatingly, then with an eagerness that betrayed an awakening purpose. Everything she said stuck deeply in the boy's mind, and whenever he thought of Granny's life afterwards, he had the impression of having learned all about it at that one time, although the likelihood is that many details were picked up by degrees and dovetailed into the memory of that first narrative as integral parts of it.

"Your grandmother was not born to be a servant," his mother began. "She was a rich man's daughter, and there was not a thing her father didn't want to do for her. Yet he left her in the hands of strangers who cheated her of her rights and treated her as if she had been a beggar...."

"Why did they do it," the boy asked, quite unable to grasp the idea of such a thing.

"Because they could make a little more money that way, and because they cared for nothing but money. Promise me, Keith, that whatever happens to you, and whatever the temptation be, you will never put money above everything else."

Keith shook his head earnestly, meaning it to be sign of assent. He was a highly impressible child, and when his mother spoke to him like that, he used literally to choke with a feeling that he could never, never do anything but what she asked, but when another rush of feeling swept over him, the old promises were also likely to be swept out of his mind.

"Those people did the worst thing any one can do to anybody else. They twisted Granny's life so that it could never be set right again. And so she became what you see her now...."

"You mean she just couldn't help herself," Keith put in.

"Yes, that's what I mean," she agreed. Then she stopped as if struck by another thought, and said very slowly:

"Although, if she had been really strong...."

Once more she stopped and returned abruptly to her story:

"Your great-grandfather made and sold hats, and he earned a lot of money, and they made him a City Councillor...."

"Where," Keith broke in again.

"In Skara," his mother explained, "which is a city that lies a long way from here, and when you begin to learn geography, you will know where it is.... Everybody liked your great-grandfather...."

"What was his name," Keith couldn't help asking.

"Lack," she said, "and now you mustn't interrupt me any more if you want me to go on."

"Please," Keith pleaded. "I won't!"

"The reason they liked him," she resumed, "was that he was so good-hearted that he couldn't say no to anybody or anything. He didn't seem to care for money at all, and he used to say: 'What's money between friends?' Everybody wanted to be friends with him in those days, and everybody borrowed from him, until he didn't have enough left for his business, and then they laughed at him. He tried in his turn to borrow, but no one could spare a penny, and when things went entirely wrong with him, one of those who had got most from him made a funny saying about him: 'Now Lack lacks everything because everybody has what Lack lacks.' So, you see, you mustn't think too little of money either, but learn to be careful and keep what you have."

Keith nodded dutifully, but where the right road lay, he could not see.

"The worst thing was," the mother went on, "that your great-grandmother died when Granny was only nine. There were brothers and sisters, too, and she was the youngest. And it was then that her father got the idea to send her to some farmer people he knew, quite some distance from where he lived. He did it partly for the sake of Granny's health, and partly because he was too worried about other things to look after her properly himself. And he paid a lot of money for her board, and sent her fine clothes, and arranged that she was to be taught by the pastor of the parish, and he sent friends to ask about her, but he never came himself. The people who were to take care of Granny kept the money and the clothes, and put her to work as if she had been a servant, and didn't let her get the least bit of schooling. And when her father's friends came and asked about her, they told all sorts of tales about how well she was doing, but she was so shy, they said, that she always ran away when any visitor came to the place."

"Did she," asked Keith.

"Yes, she really did," the mother admitted. "She was ashamed of the way she looked and was dressed, and yet she was quite pretty, and she had the most wonderful hair that reached to her feet when she let it down."

"But, why didn't she tell somebody?" Keith insisted, his blood running hot with wrath at the injustice to which Granny had been submitted.

"Oh, because ..." said his mother wearily, "because your grandmother has always been peculiar in that way when she knew she was being wronged. 'What is the use?' she says. And then word came that her father had gone bankrupt and had died soon after. No one seemed to pay the least attention to her. She stayed where she was, and she couldn't work any harder than she had done all the time. But when she was to be confirmed, and had to go to church every week with all the other children of her own age, she was the poorest of them all, both in fact and in appearance, she didn't have one person in the world to whom she could turn. She has told me that she used to lie awake nights crying and thinking of running away, but she couldn't make up her mind to that either."

She stopped, and Keith waited in vain for the rest of the story.

"And then," he urged.

"Oh, then she came to Stockholm and married your grandfather--my papa, you know. And now Lena is waiting for me to tell her what we are to have for dinner."

Keith went back to his own corner for a while. Then he made a dash for the kitchen, where he found Granny seated in her usual place peeling potatoes. Having placed a smaller foot-stool beside the large one in which she was seated, he got up on it so that he could put both arms about her neck. Pressing his own soft cheek against hers, he asked brokenly:

"Are you very unhappy, Granny?"

"No," she answered placidly, "not when you are willing to give me a kiss."

"All right," he said without enthusiasm as he complied with her request. At the same time he recalled suddenly that he had not played a single game with his tin soldiers that whole morning.

The boy had a logical mind. He knew that Granny's story had not been finished, and he wanted all of it. At the first opportune moment he asked his mother:

"Was Granny a little girl when she came to Stockholm?"

"No," said his mother unsuspectingly, "she was already a young woman."

"What did she do before?"

"I told you," the mother replied, now on her guard.

"You told me what she did as a little girl, but not afterwards. I want to know."

"Oh, she worked, I suppose."

There was evidently nothing more to be had in that direction.

"And what did she do in Stockholm," Keith pushed on.

"She married your grandfather, as I told you, and then I was born."

"What was he?"

The mother remained silent for a good long while, and Keith repeated his question, not yet having learned that unanswered questions generally are unwelcome questions.

"He was a vaktmästare," she said finally, and Keith knew that, for some reason, she found the word unpleasant.

The boy reflected a while before he observed:

"That's what papa is."

"Your father's position is quite different," his mother rejoined sharply. "It's a shame that he and his comrades in the bank have no other title--although some of them deserve nothing better."

"What should they be called?"

"I don't know exactly--collectors, I think, because they go around and collect the money that is due to the bank."

"And what are real vaktmästare doing?"

"The real ones work in government departments--not as officials, but just as attendants--it's something you can't understand yet."

Keith nodded. He didn't understand, but the words stuck and the understanding came later.

"And those that are not real," he persisted.

His mother laughed and patted him on the head.

"There is a lot of them," she said. "They look after coats and hats in theatres and restaurants, and wait at dinners, and do all sorts of things."

"Was that what grandfather was doing?"

A queer look came into his mother's eyes and sent a glow of self-satisfaction through his whole being. The look was familiar to him and meant that his mother was annoyed by the question but pleased with his cleverness in thinking of it.

"No," she answered, "not exactly...."

"What did he do," asked Keith, and as he spoke he sent a look of anticipation toward his own corner.

"He was an attendant in the big club where all the rich business-men go to spend their evenings, and he died when I was a little girl ... have you nothing else to ask about?"

"What was papa's father," Keith ventured after a pause.

"He worked in the royal palace." Again the mother's tone served as a warning, but also as a goad to the boy's curiosity.

"What did he do there," he demanded eagerly.

The lines about his mother's mouth grew tighter and harder, and she spoke as if the words hurt her--but she did not refuse to answer, and she did not send him away:

"He was a lackey."

From the moment he began to speak, Keith had showed an unusual sense for the value and peculiarities of words. They interested him for their own sake, one might say. He treasured them, and he gave more thought to them than to people. The word lackey he had heard before, and he had formed a distinct opinion about it as not desirable.

"Then he was a servant," he blurted out.

"In a way," his mother admitted. "And we are all servants, for that matter. But working in the king's palace is not like--working as Lena does here, for instance."

The last part of her remark went by unheeded by Keith. His thoughts leapt instead to his paternal grandmother--a strict and unapproachable little lady who visited them at rare intervals dressed in a quaint old shawl and a lace-trimmed cap. A great wonder, not unmixed with pleasure, rose in his mind at the thought that her husband had been a sort of servant after all. For some reason utterly beyond him, there was solace as well as humiliation in the consciousness of a stigma, if such it be, that attached equally to both his grandfathers, and not only to his mother's parent. Then a new idea prompted a new question.

"Was Granny a servant when she came to Stockholm?"

"She was obliged to take service in order to live," his mother replied very gently. "There is nothing about that to be ashamed of.... I have known fine ladies who started in the kitchen. But, of course, one doesn't like to talk of it to everybody."

Keith recognized the hint in her final words, but thought it needless. He was already on his way back to his own corner, tired for the time of asking questions, when he suddenly turned and said:

"We are just as good as anybody else, are we not?"

It was a phrase he had overheard sometime. Now it seemed to fit the occasion, and it sounded good to him.

"There is the royal family," his mother rejoined enigmatically. "But one of Granny's cousins was a lieutenant-colonel in the army."

"Where is he now," Keith demanded, agog with interest.

"He is dead, and--and we have never had anything to do with his family."

The inquisitiveness of Keith with regard to his ancestors and the past life of his parents continued for quite a while. Other family connections seemed unreal and did not interest him. Having no sister or brother of his own, relationships of that kind were meaningless to him. Parents, on the other hand, constituted a tangible personal experience, and the presence of Granny taught that this experience was common to grown-up people as well as children.

The curiosity he evinced was queerly impersonal, however, and might well be called intellectual. The information he received had no power over his own life. He could have been told anything, and he would have accepted it calmly as something not affecting himself. The only thing that influenced him was the manner of the person answering his questions. To that manner he was almost morbidly sensitive, and from it he concluded whether the various details related should please or disturb him.

Instinctively he pressed his inquiries at points eliciting marked resistance. And it was not what he actually learned, but the evasions encountered, that produced the sensitiveness about his own backgrounds which later often influenced his attitude harmfully at moments when he most needed complete self-assurance. It was the reluctance with which certain parts of the family history were told, and the total withholding of others, that taught him to be ashamed of things for which he could not be held personally responsible. The effect of this lesson on his character was the more fatal because it remained unconscious so long. Having become doubtful as to the worth of the roots of the tree, it was only natural that he should also feel doubts about the fruit.

Concerning the real character of his forbears he learned next to nothing. All that he heard related to external circumstances that were, or were not, judged respectable and presentable. One fact in particular was subject to the most rigid exclusion from all family conversations, and yet it leaked down to Keith at a time when he was utterly incapable of appreciating its significance. It piqued him mightily without disturbing him.

One day they were visited by his father's married sister, who was lacking in sentimentality and had a disturbing way of calling a spade a spade. The inevitable testing of the boy's cleverness by making him tell his own name led to a discussion of family names in general, Keith's mother expressing a great admiration for that of Wellander.

"Oh, yes, it's good enough," remarked her sister-in-law, "but it is not the right one, you know, and the old one was much finer."

"I know," said the mother, "but I don't know what the name used to be."

"Cederskjöld, and I think it was recognized as noble. I never knew the inside of it, but it looks peculiar. Carl's and my father and his brother and two sisters took common action to get the family name changed to Wellander. I am sure my grandfather must have been up to some rather striking deviltry, and for all I know he might have been hanged."

"Hush," cried Keith's mother with a quick glance at the boy who was taking in everything with wide-open eyes and ears.

Keith did not wait for anything more, but sneaked off by himself to think. The change of the name seemed nothing at the time, but the suggestion that his great-grandfather had been hanged was startling enough to give food for many meditations. Fortunately, or unfortunately, his aunt's manner had been too nonchalant to give him any clues. And from the manner of his mother he gathered merely that the asking of questions would be useless. So it came about that Keith for the first time in his life regretted the premature death of his paternal grandfather, from whom, otherwise, he might have elicited some more satisfactory information.

Both grandfathers were dead long before Keith was born. He never saw a portrait of either of them, or had an idea of how they looked. He could not even recall having heard their Christian names. The personality of his paternal grandfather always remained a total blank to him. Of the other one he knew a little more. The fashionable club where his mother's father served was notorious for its conviviality and reckless gambling, and the men were like the masters to some extent. This one of his grandfathers used to love wine, women, cards and everything else that helped to modify life's general drabness. He must have been something of a wit, too, in his own circles, having any number of boon companions. Keith never heard what kind of a man he was at home. He made good money while he lived and spent it as carelessly as he earned it. At forty-two he died, leaving a penniless widow to look after a daughter still in her early teens. Keith's paternal grandfather died in the same way, but his widow, who was a hard-headed little woman of old peasant stock--the best in Sweden--did better with four children than the other grandmother with one.

There were gaps in the stories of his mother and Granny concerning which he never got a direct reply from them, but by degrees he picked up many missing details from other sources. What he learned in this way indicated merely that they had been very poor at times, and poverty had forced them to earn a living by work that was quite honest and decent, but not "socially respectable." At one time, before her daughter was old enough to assume a share of the burden, Granny had actually had to fall back on the coarsest and humblest menial work--scrubbing and washing by the day in strange houses. Yet she and her daughter appeared throughout that ordeal to have remained on terms of pleasant intimacy with friends of the class to which they regarded themselves as properly belonging.

Another problem never solved for Keith was what kind of schooling his mother had had. Her own failure to tell suggested that it must have been of the slightest. Yet Keith never thought of her as ignorant. She had a bright, eager mind that, when not clouded, acted as a goad on his own. It was she who taught him to read and filled him with an awe for books and book-learning that was, perhaps, not entirely wholesome. She herself read eagerly, though fitfully, her interest in all such matters varying greatly with her mood and condition. Her day-dreaming was to a large extent directed toward matters literary and artistic. Sometimes, when she had read some novel with a markedly sentimental appeal, she talked vaguely of old ambitions to write, but as a rule it was her ignorance of music that she deplored. In the meantime her lace-making and her embroidery proved an artistic sense not wholly confined to dreams. She was always busy with some work of that kind, but her longings went far beyond it, and it happened more than once that she let her work drop in her lap while she looked at Keith with an expression he could not understand.

"If only I had had your chance in life," she exclaimed on one occasion of that kind.

"What do you mean," asked the boy, snuggling close to her.

"I mean that you will study and be able to do things," she answered, bending down to kiss him.

At that very moment the father entered and heard what she said.

"Nonsense," he broke in. "The boy is going to learn a trade, and I think we'll ask Uncle Granstedt to make a carpenter of him."

To Keith it was all meaningless, and his mother said nothing at the time, but a slight stiffening of her face warned him that his father's remark pointed in a direction not held desirable by her. And from that sign the boy took his cue.