“Look now!”

Glancing up, he found that a new room full of people had appeared where before was nothing but a flat wall.

“What became of the wall, mamma,” he asked aloud.  She hushed him with a smile, and he heard some one in another box titter.

“Now keep very quiet and try to follow what happens on the stage,” his mother admonished in another whisper.

They were giving Auber’s “Crown Diamonds.”  The rich dresses appealed somewhat to him, but not strongly.  The music made no impression on him whatsoever.  The general effect on his mind was one of bewilderment, that soon lapsed into bored indifference.  Then he discovered that most of the men on the stage were armed, and that some of them acted as if they might put their weapons into use at any moment.  And he, the ardent participant in all the bloody deeds of Siegfried and Dietrich and Kriemhild, he, the passionate hunter of big game on five continents, became so nervous that nothing but fear of his father kept him from burying his head in his mother’s lap in order not to see any more.  When, at last, a shot rang out on the stage, even that fear could no longer restrain him, and there was nothing for his mother to do but to escort him out of the box into the corridor.  There, under the care of a friendly doorkeeper who treated him to candy out of a paper bag, he stayed in perfect contentment until his parents were ready to go home.

“Oh, we must go again, Carl,” he heard his mother cry in a tone of high exultation.

“All right, you go,” said the father with a yawn, Keith and I don’t care—­do we, Keith?”

“No,” Keith replied mechanically, but even as he spoke he became conscious of a desire to share his mother’s enthusiasm rather than his father’s indifference.  If they would only promise not to shoot! ...

XVII

Three years he remained in the school of the Misses Ahlberg.  Three times fall and winter and spring were followed by that painfully delicious period of almost unbroken daylight, when the very books seemed to lose some of their magic, when even the air of the old lane became fraught with some mystic urge, and when life within stone walls turned into an unbearable burden.

He rose by degrees from mere spelling to the study of a foreign language, German.  He learned his Catechism by heart—­or rather by rote, for the time-worn phrases dropped from his lips at demand very much as water runs down a mill sluice, without leaving any trace.  In fact, little of what he learned appeared to touch his real life at all.  Nor could he be made to take it very seriously, although, on the whole, he was counted a good pupil.

He used schoolbooks, of course, but he was rarely caught reading one of them.  His mind seemed to master the offered knowledge by some mysterious process of absorption of which he himself was never aware.  Study in the sense of close and painful application was quite foreign to him.  Yet he seemed capable of mastering anything that aroused his interest—­or that stirred his vanity, for he loved to shine.  Unfortunately most of his schoolmates were dull plodders who had not yet reached a stage where plodding counted, and so his triumphs came easy and there was nothing to spur him into serious effort.