At that moment her mood suddenly changed.

“There is one thing I have never told you.  But for my being made so sick when you were born, you would have had a little brother, and you would not have been so lonesome, and perhaps everything would have been better.  But he was born dead.  And now I have no one but you, and I shall have no one else, and you are everything to me, and you must love me very much and never leave me.”

Her arms were about him, and she was crying.  And soon both felt better.  But Keith had heard things he could not forget.  And there was food in them for a summer’s thought.

PART IV

I

Form the very start the fifth grade was a disappointment.  Once Keith, like all the rest of the smaller boys, had looked up to it with awe-stricken yearnings as to a peak that only a few fortunate few could hope to climb.  It was then the top of the school.  Its pupils were revered seniors—­olympians tarrying momentarily among ordinary mortals before they took flight for the exalted regions where they really belonged.  All this had been changed by the reorganization.  The fifth grade now was merely a continuation of the fourth and a stepping stone to the sixth.  And Keith’s class was the first one to miss the honours of which successive generations had dreamed as far back as the school had existed.  It was a thing no one had considered when the great news was passed around in the spring.  Now it was brought home to those most nearly concerned with that poignancy of realization of which only youth is capable.  It gave to the whole class a peculiar atmosphere as if it had been marked in advance for defeat.  The teachers seemed to feel it, too, and especially the old Rector, who, after so many years of supreme command, suddenly found himself reduced to a subordinate position.

Keith felt robbed like the rest.  And like them, he felt that the instruction had become a mere humdrum routine enabling a certain number of boys to get the proper marks at the end of a certain number of months.  What had lured him on as an adventure had turned into a tedious grind.  And more and more he drifted back into a dream world of his own out of which he had been dragged by Dally’s good-humoured jibes.  And yet, what could he expect?  Had not Dally even, his best friend in the whole school, cheated him of the honour he had rightfully earned—­an honour that, once lost, could never be recovered?

The subjects, on the whole, were the same as in the previous grade.  You simply went further into them—­that was all.  The teachers were the same, and the relationships once established between them and the boys remained the same, for good or bad.  Every one knew what to expect, on both sides, and no one quite escaped from the resulting sense of staleness.

The old Rector went on cramming the class with Latin grammar.  He had a way of making some poor stumbler conjugate the same verb fifteen to twenty times in succession, so that the correct sequence might never again escape his memory.  And as the red-faced sinner stammered out the tenses, the Rector would make a tube of his left hand into which he poked his right thumb.  This gesture was always accompanied by the same mocking remark: