One day they were visited by his father’s married sister, who was lacking in sentimentality and had a disturbing way of calling a spade a spade.  The inevitable testing of the boy’s cleverness by making him tell his own name led to a discussion of family names in general, Keith’s mother expressing a great admiration for that of Wellander.

“Oh, yes, it’s good enough,” remarked her sister-in-law, “but it is not the right one, you know, and the old one was much finer.”

“I know,” said the mother, “but I don’t know what the name used to be.”

“Cederskjoeld, and I think it was recognized as noble.  I never knew the inside of it, but it looks peculiar.  Carl’s and my father and his brother and two sisters took common action to get the family name changed to Wellander.  I am sure my grandfather must have been up to some rather striking deviltry, and for all I know he might have been hanged.”

“Hush,” cried Keith’s mother with a quick glance at the boy who was taking in everything with wide-open eyes and ears.

Keith did not wait for anything more, but sneaked off by himself to think.  The change of the name seemed nothing at the time, but the suggestion that his great-grandfather had been hanged was startling enough to give food for many meditations.  Fortunately, or unfortunately, his aunt’s manner had been too nonchalant to give him any clues.  And from the manner of his mother he gathered merely that the asking of questions would be useless.  So it came about that Keith for the first time in his life regretted the premature death of his paternal grandfather, from whom, otherwise, he might have elicited some more satisfactory information.

Both grandfathers were dead long before Keith was born.  He never saw a portrait of either of them, or had an idea of how they looked.  He could not even recall having heard their Christian names.  The personality of his paternal grandfather always remained a total blank to him.  Of the other one he knew a little more.  The fashionable club where his mother’s father served was notorious for its conviviality and reckless gambling, and the men were like the masters to some extent.  This one of his grandfathers used to love wine, women, cards and everything else that helped to modify life’s general drabness.  He must have been something of a wit, too, in his own circles, having any number of boon companions.  Keith never heard what kind of a man he was at home.  He made good money while he lived and spent it as carelessly as he earned it.  At forty-two he died, leaving a penniless widow to look after a daughter still in her early teens.  Keith’s paternal grandfather died in the same way, but his widow, who was a hard-headed little woman of old peasant stock—­the best in Sweden—­did better with four children than the other grandmother with one.