o the university, Wellander, won't you--you with your brilliant mind?"

Keith looked at him in dumb astonishment. In spite of his two prizes, it
was so strange to be called brilliant. And then the question of going to
the university had been raised. Until then he had really never given a
thought to it. And the question of cost leaped into his mind. He was
beginning to learn at last that money was needed for a number of things
you liked to do. Would it cost much, and could his father afford to pay
that much, and, most important of all, would his father consent to pay
it? Those were novel questions--and as he did so often when faced by
something unpleasant or disturbing, so, now again, he pushed them aside,
fled from them, refused to have anything to do with them. There were
still five grades between him and that threateningly attractive
possibility, the student's white cap.

"I don't know," he said at last, being a truthful fool in most matters,
"I have not asked papa yet."

And there was a smile on the other boy's face which Keith disliked
without guessing the significance of it.

Commencement brought him a prize again--a German dictionary just like
the one Krass got when Keith carried off the highest prize in school
after thinking himself ignominiously passed by. Of course, a prize was a
prize, but--and he thought his father looked rather disappointed when he
heard of it.

However, George Murray also received a book, and It was no better than
Keith's, although Murray professed to see a great difference between a
German Dictionary and a Latin Classic.

XXIII

Murray was going off with his family to their private summer residence
in the archipelago outside of Stockholm and Keith gathered that it must
be a very magnificent place. The Wellanders didn't go to the country at
all. Keith's mother had a very bad period again, full of worry and
depression. The summer dragged along joylessly, and Keith had to fall
back on Johan's company in so far as he could obtain it. But Johan was
getting very independent. He had plenty of other acquaintances, and what
Keith saw of them made him deem it wiser not to mention them at all to
his mother. He was gradually learning discretion of a kind.

He read a good deal, and he was beginning to make unauthorized visits to
his father's bookcase in the parlour. There he had discovered certain
volumes by one Jules Verne, and if he could only have plunged freely
into these, the summer m