After a brief talk with the teacher, Keith’s mother to him: 

“This is Aunt Westergren, whom you must obey as you obey me.  And now be a good boy and don’t cry.”

As the mother tarried by the door for a moment to exchange a last word with the teacher, and perhaps also to cast one more lingering glance at the boy, a little girl ran up to Keith, put her right fore-finger on top of his head and cried out: 

“Towhead!”

All the other children giggled.  Keith blushed more deeply than ever, but did not say a word or stir a limb.  A moment later the teacher began to cross-question him about his knowledge of letters and spelling, and he found it much easier to answer her than to face the children.  But, of course, after a while he was quite at home among them without knowing how it had happened.

That afternoon his mother came for him.  The next morning he had to start out alone under direct orders from the father, and alone he made his way home again, his bosom swelling with a sense of wonderful independence.  Years passed before he learned that his mother had watched over him for days before she was fully convinced of his ability to find the way by himself.

The autumn passed.  Winter and spring came and went.  It was summer again.  The little school closed.  Keith could read the head-lines at the tops of the pages in the big Bible without help.  But of the school where he had learned it hardly a memory remained.  It was as if the place had made no impression whatsoever on his mind.  And the children with whom he studied and played nearly a whole year might as well have been dreams, forgotten at the moment of waking—­all but one of them.

Harald alone seemed a real, living thing, a part of Keith’s own life, but not a part of the school where the two met daily.  He was a year older than Keith, a little slow mentally, but rather unusually advanced in other ways.  His father was a merchant of some sort, with an office of his own and half a dozen clerks at his command, and Harald had been taught to regard himself as a young gentleman.  They lived a few houses from the school, in the same street, and their home was a revelation to Keith.

Houses less fortunate than his own were familiar to him, but he had never seen a better one until he was asked to visit Harald for the first time, and the comparisons made on that occasion stuck deeply in his mind.

They entered through a hallway where caps and coats were left behind, and from there they went into a room where every piece of furniture was of mahogany.  Between the windows hung a mirror in a gilded frame that was as tall as the room itself, so that Keith could see himself from head to foot.  The object that caught the boy’s attention most of all, however, was a chandelier suspended from the middle of the ceiling and made up of hundreds of little rods of glass.  As Harald slammed the door on entering, some of the rods were set in motion and struck against each other with a tiny twinkle that seemed to Keith the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.