And there were still others.  Wherever he turned within the narrowing family circle, he met similar instances of progress in the wrong direction.  Some were sinners and some were victims of fate—­or seemed so—­but it came to the same thing in the end.

“The Wellanders are going,” Keith’s mother said one day to Aunt Brita when she was too depressed and worried to mind the boy’s presence.

“Yes,” replied Aunt Brita grimly, “and so is everybody else who ever had anything to do with them.  Keith will have to start it all over again from the beginning.”

That seemed to settle it for the moment.  Of what avail could his own feeble struggles be in the face of an adverse destiny?

He brooded over it, and out of his brooding came resentment, and more and more this resentment turned against his relatives in a fury of disgust.  He had a feeling of their having betrayed him....

Now and then, however, one of the expressions used by Aunt Brita would recur to him with a suggestion of quite different possibilities.

“Keith will have to start it all over again from the beginning,” she had said.

XVIII

If he only had some one to talk to....  But he was more lonely than ever.  Murray had moved to another part of the city, more in keeping with his father’s increasing prosperity, and was now attending a North End school.  They had parted with no more ado than if they had expected to meet the next day again.  Now and then Keith thought of Murray with a touch of sentimental regret, but it was wearing off.

Johan was still found at the foot of the lane, smoking and bragging and leering as before.  To Keith he had become positively loathsome.

There was no one else in sight—­not one boy in the class out of whom Keith might hope to make a friend.  Leaving other factors aside, his lack of pocket money was sufficient to keep him apart from the rest.  They all had some sort of allowance, however scant, and they took turns treating each other to pastry or candy bought from a couple of old women who brought basketfuls, to the school doors during every pause.  He had to beg especially for every oere, he couldn’t get much at that.

He wore a suit made over by his mother from clothes given to her by a woman of some means with whom she had a slight acquaintance.  They had been outgrown by that woman’s son, and they had been offered to Keith’s mother because they were too good to be thrown away.  There was nothing about it to be ashamed of, and the made-over suit was neat enough, though a little awkwardly cut.  A couple of years earlier, Keith would have hailed it with delight.  Now the wearing of it seemed worse than going about naked.  He thought that every one noticed the suit and knew that it was not really meant for him.