come back once more to look.

"There's my mumsey now," said Johan philosophically, pointing to an open
window on the ground floor of the corner house. With that he slouched
off in a manner that Keith half envied and half resented.

XXIII

The sudden emergence of Johan had filled Keith's heart with a new hope.
Here was a possible playmate at last. The fact that his father was a
_vaktmaestare_ like Keith's ought to settle all paternal opposition, the
boy thought. But to his great surprise, he found this not to be
the case.

A severe cross-examination followed his return home. In the midst of it,
Keith made a grievous strategic mistake, lured on by his insatiable
curiosity about strange words.

"Why does Johan call his mamma 'mumsey' and his papa 'popsey,'" he asked
unexpectedly. "It sounds funny."

"Because he does not know any better," his mother rejoined with
unmistakable disapproval. "It doesn't sound nice, and it isn't nice."

"But his papa and mamma don't care," Keith objected.

"That's the worst of it," said the mother. "It shows they are not very
nice people, and I wish to talk to your father before you can play with
Johan any more."

"I have heard of them," the grandmother piped up, making them both turn
towards her, one hopefully and the other doubtfully.

The grandmother never left the kitchen. She walked from the sofa to the
big foot-stool, from the foot-stool to the table by the window, and from
the table back to the sofa. Sometimes she would not be seen talking to
another person for days. And yet she had a miraculous way of surprising
the rest of the family with pieces of gossip picked out of the air, one
might think. There was apparently not a person in the neighbourhood of
whom she had not heard, and about whom she could not give some more or
less intimate piece of information. They were all perfect strangers to
her, but she followed their lives with as much keenness for minute
details as if they had been her nearest kin or dear friends.

"She was a cook in the house of the man whose office Gustafsson works
in," the grandmother went on. "He used to do odd jobs for the family,
cutting wood and such things, and in that way he met her in the kitchen,
and one fine day they decided to get married. She is older than him, and
I guess it was her last chance. But the family was crazy about her, and
when they heard of it, they gave him the place of attendant in the
office downstairs and the two rooms