“Oh, please, mamma,” the boy pleaded, his voice breaking a little, “can’t I stay just a little longer?”

“You must come at once,” his mother commanded.

“Is that your mumsey,” Johan asked.

“It is my mamma,” Keith retorted, his attention momentarily diverted by Johan’s most peculiar way of referring to his parents.

“Then you had better go,” advised the new friend sagely, “or she will tell your popsey, and then you know what happens to you.”

“I think I can come down again, if you wait for me,” cried Keith as he ran into the long dark passageway.

At that moment a cry of “Johan” rose from the lower part of the lane, and Keith had to come back once more to look.

“There’s my mumsey now,” said Johan philosophically, pointing to an open window on the ground floor of the corner house.  With that he slouched off in a manner that Keith half envied and half resented.

XXIII

The sudden emergence of Johan had filled Keith’s heart with a new hope.  Here was a possible playmate at last.  The fact that his father was a vaktmaestare like Keith’s ought to settle all paternal opposition, the boy thought.  But to his great surprise, he found this not to be the case.

A severe cross-examination followed his return home.  In the midst of it, Keith made a grievous strategic mistake, lured on by his insatiable curiosity about strange words.

“Why does Johan call his mamma ‘mumsey’ and his papa ‘popsey,’” he asked unexpectedly.  “It sounds funny.”

“Because he does not know any better,” his mother rejoined with unmistakable disapproval.  “It doesn’t sound nice, and it isn’t nice.”

“But his papa and mamma don’t care,” Keith objected.

“That’s the worst of it,” said the mother.  “It shows they are not very nice people, and I wish to talk to your father before you can play with Johan any more.”

“I have heard of them,” the grandmother piped up, making them both turn towards her, one hopefully and the other doubtfully.

The grandmother never left the kitchen.  She walked from the sofa to the big foot-stool, from the foot-stool to the table by the window, and from the table back to the sofa.  Sometimes she would not be seen talking to another person for days.  And yet she had a miraculous way of surprising the rest of the family with pieces of gossip picked out of the air, one might think.  There was apparently not a person in the neighbourhood of whom she had not heard, and about whom she could not give some more or less intimate piece of information.  They were all perfect strangers to her, but she followed their lives with as much keenness for minute details as if they had been her nearest kin or dear friends.