the embroidery once for all, but it seemed also to
bring matters to a head. As soon as the father was done with his meal,
the mother made him accompany her into the parlour, and there they
stayed an endless time. When they returned to the living-room, Keith
could see that his mother had been crying, but she was smiling brightly
at that moment, and her voice had a ring of triumph when she said:

"Papa has something to tell you, Keith."

"Yes," the father drawled. "Your mother, as usual, has persuaded me to
do what I doubt is right. Because she has pleaded for you, I'll let you
enter the public school in the fall. That will cost money, and I am not
sure it is good for a poor man's son like you, but we'll see. It means
that you will have to do some studying at last, for if you don't--well,
then you'll have to learn a trade."

As always on such occasions, Keith took his cue from the mother, and her
mien told him that he ought to be pleased. It was a new departure
anyhow, and it implied evidently an advance that would administer to his
rather undernourished sense of self-importance. For anything doing so he
had a passionate craving, and so he was ready to rejoice.

The new school was still far off, however, and in the meantime there was
close at hand a problem that piqued him annoyingly. Had his father
really meant to make a carpenter or a tailor of him if his mother had
not interceded, or was the talk about it merely an expression of the
father's peculiar unwillingness to admit any sort of tender feeling
toward the son?

That was not the way Keith put it, in so far as he attempted any
formulation at all, but it was in substance what his momentary
speculations amounted to, and the solution of the problem lay quite
beyond him. He never could make out just what his father meant or
thought or felt in regard to himself.

XVIII

Then several developments followed each other in quick succession. First
of all his father bought him a season ticket at the public baths in the
North River and made him join a class of small boys for instruction in
the manly art of swimming. The world was opening up, Keith felt, and his
father was lured to the verge of openly expressed satisfaction at
finding that the boy's timidity did not extend to cold water.

No sooner, however, had he mastered the mechanics of the thing
sufficiently to graduate from the board-walk onto a cork pillow in the
water, than he had to quit because the whole f