“Did you ever speak to your mother of me?”

“I did,” replied Murray calmly.  “And she said that while she had no objection to our keeping company, she did not think your father’s position was such that we could ask you home.”

A strange thing happened to Keith at that moment.  It seemed to him that everything had been satisfactorily explained, and that there was no reason why he should be angry with Murray or offended at his friend’s parents.  He had simply been made to suffer for something that had nothing to do with his own person.

“Hey, twins,” a classmate yelled at them just then.

“I suppose you couldn’t help it,” Keith said weakly to Murray.

“I really should have liked to have you,” Murray answered, and it made Keith feel as if he had been more than compensated for his previous sufferings.

After that their friendship continued outwardly as before, but there was a difference.  A tendency to nag and find fault appeared on both sides, and on several occasions they broke into actual quarrels.  These always ended in reconcilations, but the old serenity had gone from their companionship, and each new misunderstanding left Keith a little more unhappy.

III

As a result of the changed relationship between himself and the friend he idealized, Keith began once more to look up Johan.  He did it rather furtively, as if he had known that he was engaged in something unworthy of himself.  There was an additional reason for this return to an association long spurned, and it had something to do with his manner of going about it.

What his mother had told him during the summer was still fermenting in his mind, but no amount of brooding over it would produce any results.  It was like trying to raise oneself by pulling at one’s own bootstraps.  He must turn to some one else for the information that alone could solve the mystery.  Murray was out of the question.  Keith had never exchanged a word with him about the subject that was taking more and more of his attention.  He knew what Murray would say if such a matter were broached: 

“I don’t think my papa would like me to talk of it, and it’s rather nasty anyhow.”

No, Johan was the person to seek for knowledge of this kind.  He was now smoking all the time when not under the eye of his mother.  While Keith almost had stood still physically, Johan had forged ahead.  There was no denying that he was coarse and dull and awkward, but there was a shrewd gleam in his somewhat bleary eyes, and from time to time he threw out dark hints about enjoyments and experiences that little boys clinging to their mother’s skirts could never master.

It became a sort of game between them—­a game that pleased Johan and drove Keith to exasperation.  It was a game of hide-and-seek.  And the most remarkable feature of it was that, although Keith was dying to know, he found it impossible to ask any direct questions.  His pose was that he didn’t care, and Johan’s counter-pose was that he didn’t know what Keith was driving at.