But the clasp of his mother’s arm was soft and tender for all that.  Her inclination to humour him in sundry respects not implying too much freedom of movement contrasted favourably with the sterner restraint exercised by his father.  And so it was only natural that, to begin with, he should cling no less closely to her than she to him.

Leaning out of the front windows was one of the favorite pursuits of his earliest childhood, and during the summer it could be indulged to a reasonable extent.

Across the lane, not more than twenty-five feet distant, was another building, the upper parts of which he could see even when the windows were closed.  It was much darker of aspect than their own house, and he knew that no people lived in it.  He called it the distillery, just as he heard his parents do, without knowing what the word meant.  Staring as he might into its dark windows, he could as a rule see nothing but the grimy panes, because in the back of it there was no courtyard at all—­nothing but a solid wall without a single opening in it.

Now and then however, he would spy the flickering light of an open-wick lamp move about on the floor level with their own.  In the fitful, smoke-enshrouded glow of that lamp he would catch fleeting glimpses of clumsy figures and spooklike faces bending over huge round objects, while at the same time, if the windows were open, he would hear much mysterious tapping and knocking.  It was all very puzzling and not quite pleasant, so that on midwinter afternoons, when he was still awake after dark, he would not care to look very long at the house opposite, and the drawing of the shades came as an actual relief.

Letting his glance drop straight down from one of their windows, he saw, at a dizzying depth, the cobbles of the lane, lined on either side by a gutter made out of huge smooth stones.  There was often water in the gutter even on dry days, when the intense blueness of the sky-strip overhead showed that the sun must be shining brightly.  Sometimes the water was thick and beautifully coloured, and then he yearned to get down and put his hands into it.  But to do so, he gathered from his mother, would not only be dangerous and contrary to her will and wish, but quite out of the question for some other reason that he could not grasp.  His mother’s standing expression for it was: 

“No nice little boy would ever do that.”

Keith’s third realization in the way of self-consciousness was an uneasy doubt of his own inherent nicety, for he soon discovered that whatever was thus particularly forbidden seemed to himself particularly desirable.

At times he saw children playing down there—­perhaps in the very gutter for which he was longing.  To him they appeared entirely like himself, but to his mother’s eye they were evidently objectionable in the same way as the gutter.  There were not many of them, however, and it was a long time before two or three of them began to return with sufficient regularity to assume a distinct identity in his mind.