Facts as facts did not interest him at all.  Even things as things did not necessarily, though they might.  The class made excursions into the fields and woods framing the capital, and under the guidance of their teacher of botany they observed and analysed all sorts of living flowers.  Keith was delighted to get out and charmed with the flowers, but the facts about them pointed out by the teacher left him profoundly unmoved.  They had exciting little experiments in chemistry, and Keith effervesced with the rest, but nothing of what he saw brought him more than a momentary diversion.

All those things left his own real life untouched.  And yet he was not merely looking for fairy tales and adventures.  His mind already was hungry for something else.  He found it often in the books he read at home, many of which had been borrowed from the school library.  Not facts—­but how different sorts of facts hung together, so to speak.  The school ought to tell him, and sometimes he had an uneasy feeling that the teachers were trying to tell him this very thing.  But they failed somehow, and the farther he advanced, the more exasperating that failure became.

He was in his thirteenth year, and he was no longer certain that he cared to study.  But reading was still his dominant passion—­reading and George Murray.

II

Relations with Murray had been resumed on the old basis.  Day after day they walked to and from school together, and hardly ever was their friendship disturbed by a misunderstanding.  In school, too, they spent a good deal of time in each other’s company, and they continued to sit side by side.  Being so much seen together, they gradually came to be known as “the twins,” which pleased Keith tremendously.  But once they had parted for the day at the corner of the Quay and the lane, there was no more communication between them.  And no matter what Keith said or did, he could never persuade his friend to break that rule.

Then Murray’s birthday came along, and he told Keith quite casually that his mother had promised to let him have a party and invite five of his schoolmates.

“Will you ask me,” Keith blurted out, his eyes shining with eagerness.

“I don’t know,” said Murray guardedly.

“But I am your best friend in school,” Keith protested.

“It depends on mamma,” Murray explained, and his voice lacked a little of its customary complacency.

“Of course, I should like to have you,” he added after a pause, but his words carried no conviction.

Keith was too hard hit to say a word.

A couple of days later, on their way home from school, Murray said unexpectedly that he and his mother had looked over the school catalogue the night before, and that his mother had picked the five boys whom he was to invite.  And he started to name them.  The first name was that of Brockert, a boy in their own class.