Keith’s progress in English showed that he was still capable of both interest and effort.  This language was quite new to him, and the class had it only one hour a week.  But the man who taught it had advanced ideas for his day, and instead of boring the boys with a lot of abstract rules relating to a wholly unknown tongue, he let them start right in on one of the English prose classics.  They were told to pick out the meaning of the principal words in advance, and the pronunciation was explained as they took turns at reading aloud.  All the time the teacher kept the principal part of their attention focused on the story gradually revealed.  During that one hour a week Keith’s mind never wandered.  But it was the only rift in the scholastic fog that kept him in a state of constant boredom.

In the meantime things were happening at home that did not help the situation.

XIII

He had moved into the parlour at last.  It was almost his own room.  An old piece of furniture, half wardrobe and half dresser, standing in the vestibule outside the parlour, had been turned over to him for good.  His library and his playthings were installed on the shelves in the upper part.  His personal things occupied a whole drawer below.  At night he slept on the big sofa, and the door to his parents’ room was closed.

One night he lay awake unusually long.  The old struggle was going on within him, and there was no peace in sight.  His parents had gone to bed a good while ago, and as far as he was concerned just then, they had practically ceased to exist.

Then his attention was attracted by a slight noise from their room.  The stillness of the night made it audible to him in spite of the closed door.  At first he listened out of idle curiosity, and to get away from his own feverish thoughts.  Finally he got up without any clear idea of what he was doing, or why he did it.  He began to tremble even as he moved on tip-toe across the room.  At the door he had to kneel down to steady himself.

He could not tell whether an hour or a minute had passed when he crawled into bed again.  His whole body was on fire.  He could feel the pulses at his temples hammering.  At that moment he knew what passion was.  The man in him had been let loose, and he wanted to cry aloud with the bitter-sweet agony of it.

There was no thought of father or mother in his mind.  The people back of the door were just a man and a woman.  The feelings that surged through his heart, shaking his body volcanically, would have been the same if those two had been perfect strangers.

No jealousy stirred him.  No sense of shame shocked him.  His dominant emotion was envy.

The visit of death had left him unmoved.  Now he had been as close to life in its most intense form, and the effect of it was maddening—­a call that seemed to make further waiting worse than death.