He went about his daily classroom tasks as in a dream, doing mechanically what he was asked, and dropping his effort as soon as the demand for it ceased.  Nothing happened during the lessons to indicate that the teachers noticed any change in him or were in any manner dissatisfied with him.  Perhaps he was saved by an occasional flaring up of interest that drew from him flashes of that brightness of mind that had won Dally and given him the reputation of an exceptional pupil.

But as the spring term drew nearer its close, he found it more and more difficult to keep up a pretence at attention.  More and more he sank into mere drifting, and he whose pride had been really to know, now trusted to luck like any dullard with a head unfit for studying.  Worse still and more significant, he began to find excuses for staying home from school.  He who had never known what it was to be sick, now developed disturbing symptom after another—­headaches and colds and digestive troubles in endless succession.  Most of the time these symptoms yielded quickly at the mere sight of the castor oil which was his mother’s favourite remedy and the taste of which Keith hated more than anything else in the world.  It was the one thing that stood inexorably between his growing indolence and the luxury of being ill.

With commencement almost in sight, all sorts of written examinations were demanded.  These he disliked additionally because his handwriting never had developed in proportion to his mental capacity.  No matter how he strove, the letters remained childishly awkward.  No two of them seemed to point in the same direction.  Not even his futile efforts at singing could fill him with a more humiliating sense of inferiority.

All his various resistances were brought into concerted action when at last the teacher in Swedish ordered him to prepare two brief original compositions on quite simple themes.  In the days of Dally he would have revelled in such a task.  Now it appalled him.  His head was empty.  The mere idea of trying to write about such things as the discovery of America and the beauties of nature seemed silly.  There was any number of books, besides, that said anything you could ever hope to say on either subject.

The end of it was that he produced an indisposition real enough not only to convince his mother but to make himself willing to face the ordeal of castor oil.  Thanks to the oil he was able to stay in bed the better part of two days.  Those were the last two days before his Swedish compositions were to be delivered.  He knew that if they were not delivered, he would get no mark in that subject, and this would prevent his graduation to a higher grade.