“... this pupil is Keith Wellander of the Second Grade,” the Rector concluded.

A murmur swept the hall, and Keith felt himself the centre of many eyes.  The murmur grew as the winner failed to appear, but Keith could not move a limb.  Dumbly and unbelievingly he stared at the Rector and the group of teachers seated around him on the platform.

“Come forward, Wellander,” the Rector said in a friendly voice as if he could well understand the overwhelming effect of such distinction.  At the same time Keith noticed Lector Dahlstroem rising partly from his seat on the platform as if to see whether anything might be the matter.

Had the ceiling opened and an angel appeared in a fiery chariot to call him heavenward, the boy could not have been more startled.  It was as if a terrific blow had paralyzed all his senses.  His classmates had to push him forward.  He never knew how he reached the platform, where the Rector was waiting for him with a small package ready for delivery.  Keith felt the weight of that package in his own hand and the gentle touch of the Rector’s hand on his head.  Words were uttered that he did not catch, and the room became filled with the noise of boisterous applause.

He bowed mechanically and turned to walk back to his seat, and as he did so, he noticed a white handkerchief waving at him from the rear of the hall.  Behind the handkerchief he caught a glimpse of his mother’s face, and a thought shot through his head: 

“Papa is here and has heard all this!”

Then he relapsed into a state of utter oblivion of the surrounding world.  The thing was too tremendous to be felt even.  Automatically he moved out of the hall and back to the classroom with the rest.  Dally was saying things to him, but he could not grasp a word.  Now and then he became vaguely conscious of awed glances cast at him by the other boys.  Some of them spoke to him, and in some strange way he managed to realize that Davidson was not among these.

At last he woke into full consciousness on the street, where he found himself walking homeward by his father’s hand.  The pressure of that hand seemed unusually soft and pleasant.  The mother was talking eagerly and wiping her eyes between little happy bursts of laughter.  The father listened for a long while in silence.

“Yes,” he said at last, “it is not a bad beginning—­if he can keep it up.”

Keith felt for a moment as if he were walking on air, and he knew that he would keep it up—­that after such a day nothing could prevent him from keeping it up.  Then a bewildering thought appeared out of nowhere and began to buzz in his tired and over-excited brain.

“If I have done all that the Rector said,” this thought demanded of him, “why in the world has Dally kept me sitting below Davidson who got nothing but books?”

VII