Keith looked at him in dumb astonishment.  In spite of his two prizes, it was so strange to be called brilliant.  And then the question of going to the university had been raised.  Until then he had really never given a thought to it.  And the question of cost leaped into his mind.  He was beginning to learn at last that money was needed for a number of things you liked to do.  Would it cost much, and could his father afford to pay that much, and, most important of all, would his father consent to pay it?  Those were novel questions—­and as he did so often when faced by something unpleasant or disturbing, so, now again, he pushed them aside, fled from them, refused to have anything to do with them.  There were still five grades between him and that threateningly attractive possibility, the student’s white cap.

“I don’t know,” he said at last, being a truthful fool in most matters, “I have not asked papa yet.”

And there was a smile on the other boy’s face which Keith disliked without guessing the significance of it.

Commencement brought him a prize again—­a German dictionary just like the one Krass got when Keith carried off the highest prize in school after thinking himself ignominiously passed by.  Of course, a prize was a prize, but—­and he thought his father looked rather disappointed when he heard of it.

However, George Murray also received a book, and It was no better than Keith’s, although Murray professed to see a great difference between a German Dictionary and a Latin Classic.

XXIII

Murray was going off with his family to their private summer residence in the archipelago outside of Stockholm and Keith gathered that it must be a very magnificent place.  The Wellanders didn’t go to the country at all.  Keith’s mother had a very bad period again, full of worry and depression.  The summer dragged along joylessly, and Keith had to fall back on Johan’s company in so far as he could obtain it.  But Johan was getting very independent.  He had plenty of other acquaintances, and what Keith saw of them made him deem it wiser not to mention them at all to his mother.  He was gradually learning discretion of a kind.

He read a good deal, and he was beginning to make unauthorized visits to his father’s bookcase in the parlour.  There he had discovered certain volumes by one Jules Verne, and if he could only have plunged freely into these, the summer might have proved quite bearable.  One day when he could not get at the books, and his mood was more than usually fretful, and his mother seemed at her lowest, she suddenly turned on him and said in a strangely bitter tone: 

“All I have to go through now is your fault, Keith.”

“Why,” he asked dumbly, staring at her.

“Because when you came into the world you hurt me so much that I have never been well since.”

“How,” he demanded, and as he spoke an idea flashed through his mind that his mother might not be knowing what she said.  Just how such a thing could happen was still a mystery to him, but what she said sounded so absurdly impossible.