“I was so homesick when I first got there,” she would say, “that I cried day and night.  Then, one night, I heard a cat mewing on the roof outside my window.  It was the first Swedish sound I had heard since I came to England, and after that I felt much better.”

“Why didn’t you stay,” asked Keith.

“Because then there would have been no little Keith,” she explained, her face lighting up with the kind of grown-up smile that always provoked and perplexed the boy.

“Are there no boys in England,” he persisted.

“Yes, plenty of them, and fine ones at that.  But I wanted no one but you, and you were here, and so I had to come back to get you.”

“Here,” he repeated.  “Where here?”

“In Sweden, of course,” his mother rejoined, and then she started hurriedly to describe the wonders of London shopping.

“But why did you go at all,” he interrupted after listening a while to what seemed less interesting to him than certain other points.  “I might have been lost while you were away.”

“You might,” she assented, “but I had to take the risk because I had to get a name for you and I could never have found the one you have in Sweden.”

“Why not?”

“Because it is English.  And it should be pronounced Keeth instead of Kite as they say here.  I found it in a book over there, and I fell in love with it the moment I saw it, and I made up my mind that if I ever had a boy, that would be his name.”

“If you had a boy,” Keith took her up.  “But you knew I was here?”

“Of course, I knew,” said his mother in the tone that always warned him that a change of occupation would be in order.  “Run along and play in your own corner now.  I must get some work done.”

At other times, when the talk didn’t drift off into dangerous by-paths, his mother would tell little anecdotes in English learned from her former mistress, and generally end up by singing a little song about a ball—­probably one that had something to do with cricket.  And Keith would exultantly repeat the last line, which was the only one he could remember: 

“And then she popped, and then she died.”

It was the word popped that caught his fancy, partly because it was so funny in itself, and partly because it had to be uttered with a sort of explosion on a very high note.  As far as his rendering of the rest was concerned—­well, it was early discovered and reluctantly admitted that, like his father, he could not even sing “Old Man Noah,” which is the simplest melody imaginable to a musical mind in Sweden.

His failure in this respect gave his mother a slight pang every time it was brought home to her, although she made fun of it and pretended she didn’t care.  Music had been her young heart’s dream.  It was the only art for which she showed a genuine regard.  And two of her pet grievances were that she didn’t have a piano, and that, if she had one, she could not play on it.