“Papa has something to tell you, Keith.”

“Yes,” the father drawled.  “Your mother, as usual, has persuaded me to do what I doubt is right.  Because she has pleaded for you, I’ll let you enter the public school in the fall.  That will cost money, and I am not sure it is good for a poor man’s son like you, but we’ll see.  It means that you will have to do some studying at last, for if you don’t—­well, then you’ll have to learn a trade.”

As always on such occasions, Keith took his cue from the mother, and her mien told him that he ought to be pleased.  It was a new departure anyhow, and it implied evidently an advance that would administer to his rather undernourished sense of self-importance.  For anything doing so he had a passionate craving, and so he was ready to rejoice.

The new school was still far off, however, and in the meantime there was close at hand a problem that piqued him annoyingly.  Had his father really meant to make a carpenter or a tailor of him if his mother had not interceded, or was the talk about it merely an expression of the father’s peculiar unwillingness to admit any sort of tender feeling toward the son?

That was not the way Keith put it, in so far as he attempted any formulation at all, but it was in substance what his momentary speculations amounted to, and the solution of the problem lay quite beyond him.  He never could make out just what his father meant or thought or felt in regard to himself.

XVIII

Then several developments followed each other in quick succession.  First of all his father bought him a season ticket at the public baths in the North River and made him join a class of small boys for instruction in the manly art of swimming.  The world was opening up, Keith felt, and his father was lured to the verge of openly expressed satisfaction at finding that the boy’s timidity did not extend to cold water.

No sooner, however, had he mastered the mechanics of the thing sufficiently to graduate from the board-walk onto a cork pillow in the water, than he had to quit because the whole family was “going into the country” for the summer.  To Keith this meant a chance of playing with other children without having to ask permission every time and rarely getting it.  To his mother it meant a distinct social advance, as no family staying in town all summer could be held really respectable.

The “country” was located on one of the numerous islands forming the outskirts of the city and could be reached by the father after he finished work by a fifteen-minute ride on one of the innumerable little steamboats running back and forth like so many busy shuttles across every sheet of water in the vicinity of Stockholm.  Even then it was a suburb, but the houses were called villas, and there were plenty of trees between the buildings, and the roads meandering whimsically among miniature lawns and gardens had no pavements, and the lake came right up to the door.