Their relationship was a peculiar one.  Although the younger by a few months and the smaller by several inches, Keith was the leader and the aggressor.  Johan remained passive—­too passive, Keith often thought.

There was nothing of love in Keith’s feelings toward Johan, nothing emotional.  The tenderness that was such a marked feature of his character did not come into play at all.  In fact, he rather looked down on Johan, who frequently annoyed him by his dullness and his lack of personal neatness.  The truth of it was that he played with Johan merely because he was the only other boy in sight, and in so far as that particular game was concerned, Johan was simply an accessory to it in same way as his tin soldiers and his toy fort.

In playing it, Keith had always a sense of seeking something else, but he had not the slightest idea of what this something might be.  It must have some relation to girls, he felt vaguely, but beyond that vague feeling he could not get.  Clara remained forgotten.

Gradually Johan became more and more indifferent and reluctant as far as that game was concerned.  Dull as he was, he seemed to have some sort of scruples that Keith couldn’t understand.  More and more Keith was thrown back on himself.  Once more a new set of interests began to take the lion’s share of his attention, although the game learned behind the big rock would reassert its puzzling fascination from time to time.

XIII

His eagerness to read and his lack of reading matter had for some time presented a growing problem.  The books of his father—­and there were quite a number of them—­were taboo for a double reason:  first, because they were not held safe for him to read, and, secondly, because his father regarded them as his particularly private property that must not be touched by any one else.

So he fell back on the old Bible and chance pickings.  The stirring and bloodcurdling stories in the Books of the Maccabees were his favourites.  He read them over and over, and he tried to dramatize that unbroken record of battles with the help of his tin soldiers.  But the reason he could return to those stories so often was that he began studying them while reading was still a partly mastered art, and half the time he was more interested in the game of reading, so to speak, than in what he read.

A year in the new school had made a great change.  He read anything with ease, and while he read rather slowly without ever skipping, his mind took in what he read quickly and thoroughly so that going back over a thing once perused became less and less attractive.  He wanted new material for his mind, and he wanted it in steadily increasing quantities.