k out what he
liked best.

"Have you forgotten what I told you," he heard his father shout to him.

"They have been thrown away," he said going toward the father.

"That is neither here nor there," was the sharp answer he got. "You know
they are not yours, and so you must not touch them. Put them back
at once."

Keith did as he was told, wondering if he really had done anything wrong
or if his father merely objected for some reason of his own.

Then he walked around uninterested and forlorn until they were ready to
go home again. The stairway seemed shorter as they descended, but the
pillars were tall and thick as before. And on the way home his father
found a little shop open and bought him a few _oere's_ worth of
hard candy.

It was the only time Keith could ever remember his having done such a
thing.

XX

The lodger happened to be away when they got home, and the mother had
opened the door to the parlour in order to get a little more air and
light into the living-room. After dinner the father went into the
parlour to take a nap on the big sofa, while the mother settled down
comfortably in her easy chair, a piece of handiwork on her lap as usual.
Keith took up his customary position on the footstool to tell her what
he had seen and done during his morning excursion.

She was eager to hear everything and helped him along with questions,
and yet there ran through her very eagerness a subtle inner resistance
which the boy felt vaguely. It as if she never really cared for anything
concerning him in which she herself had not taken part.

The original glamour had returned to every aspect of his new experience,
and he tried excitedly to describe the wonders of the vestibule, the
stairway and the big hall. In the midst of it he paused suddenly and
fell to staring into vacancy.

"Was that all," she asked, puzzled by his silence.

"Lena dusts our rooms, doesn't she," was his rather startling
counter-question.

"Mostly," the mother replied with a searching glance at his puckered
brows. "Although I sometimes ..."

"You don't have to," the boy broke in.

"No" she admitted, "but then I am sure it is properly done."

"Is that why papa dusts the tables in the bank?"

A pause followed during which it was the mother's turn to stand the
boy's intense scrutiny.

"No," she said at last. "He does it because it is a part of his work,
and a shame it is that he has to. Scrub-women come in and do the rest of
the cl