“I know what you mean,” said Keith calmly.  Both parents looked at him in surprise, but neither comment nor rebuke ensued.

“No,” the mother went on after a while, “he says that he knows he will be well and back at his office in two weeks.  He actually laughed when I tried to say something about his being very ill.  It brought on his cough again, and for a moment I thought he would die then and there.  But when the attack was over, he asked me if I couldn’t hear that the cough was much better.  What do you think I ought to do?”

“Nothing,” the father replied once more.

Keith was ready to start for school next morning when he heard Hilda utter a startled cry in the parlour.

“Fru Wellander!  Fru Wellander!” she called.

Before the mother had a chance to move, the frightened face of the girl appeared in the parlour door, and she whispered as if afraid of waking some one out of sleep: 

“He is dead.”

Both women hurried into the parlour.  Keith stood irresolute for a moment.  Then he made for the kitchen door and ran downstairs at top speed.  He was afraid of missing Murray.

All during that day a thought would bother his brain like a buzzing fly:  how peculiar that a man could want to order a new suit of clothes a few hours before he died.  There was something irrational about it that stumped him.  For a moment he thought of speaking to Murray about it, but it was as if some one had put a hand firmly over his mouth every time he tried to do so.

The funeral took place in a couple of days.  A distant relative had turned up, very apologetic and eager to explain that his dead cousin had failed to let any one know that he was sick even.  This young man, the minister, and Keith’s parents were the only mourners.  A single carriage sufficed.

Keith never went into the parlour during those days.  When everything was nearly ready, the mother asked him if he cared to go in and have a last look at poor Herr Stangenberg before the lid was put on the coffin.  Keith merely shook his head.

“You had better go,” Granny called from the kitchen.  “I never saw him better-looking while he was alive.”

“I won’t,” Keith yelled back with an amount of irritation that seemed quite out of proportion to its cause.  The mother gave him an uneasy glance but left the room without saying anything at the time.

As far as the boy was concerned, the incident was closed.  He had never permitted it to take a real hold of his mind, and he resented anybody’s attempt to bring it closer to him.  Death had stopped within his own threshold, and he simply looked in the opposite direction.  This attitude sprang mainly from some inner resistance so stubborn that it would not even permit itself to be discussed.  In addition, his mind was engrossed with other things, and the principal significance it attached to the passing of a human life at such close quarters was the hope it held out that the parlour might remain vacant.