s parents occupied a three-room flat. The parlour
and the living-room had two windows each, looking into the lane. The
kitchen in the rear opened a single window on the narrowest, barest,
darkest courtyard you ever saw, its one redeeming feature being a
glimpse of sky above the red-tiled roof of the building opposite.

In such surroundings Keith spent the better part of his first sixteen
years.

He was an only son, much loved, and one of his first conscious
realizations was a sharp sense of restraint, as if he had been tied to a
string by which he was pulled back as soon as anything promised to
become interesting.

At first he thought the world made up entirely of those three rooms,
where he, his parents, Granny--his maternal grandmother--and a more or
less transient servant girl had lived for ever. Visitors drifted in, of
course, but he seemed to think that they had come from nowhere and would
return to the same place. What instilled the first idea of a wider
outside world in his mind was leaning out through one of the windows,
with his mother's arm clutched tightly about his waist.

There was something symbolic in that clutch, for his mother was always
full of fear that dire things befall him. She was afraid of many other
things besides, and the need of being constantly worried was probably
his second clear realization.

But the clasp of his mother's arm was soft and tender for all that. Her
inclination to humour him in sundry respects not implying too much
freedom of movement contrasted favourably with the sterner restraint
exercised by his father. And so it was only natural that, to begin with,
he should cling no less closely to her than she to him.

Leaning out of the front windows was one of the favorite pursuits of his
earliest childhood, and during the summer it could be indulged to a
reasonable extent.

Across the lane, not more than twenty-five feet distant, was another
building, the upper parts of which he could see even when the windows
were closed. It was much darker of aspect than their own house, and he
knew that no people lived in it. He called it the distillery, just as he
heard his parents do, without knowing what the word meant. Staring as he
might into its dark windows, he could as a rule see nothing but the
grimy panes, because in the back of it there was no courtyard at
all--nothing but a solid wall without a single opening in it.

Now and then however, he would spy the flickering light of