ight have proved quite bearable. One day when he
could not get at the books, and his mood was more than usually fretful,
and his mother seemed at her lowest, she suddenly turned on him and said
in a strangely bitter tone:

"All I have to go through now is your fault, Keith."

"Why," he asked dumbly, staring at her.

"Because when you came into the world you hurt me so much that I have
never been well since."

"How," he demanded, and as he spoke an idea flashed through his mind
that his mother might not be knowing what she said. Just how such a
thing could happen was still a mystery to him, but what she said sounded
so absurdly impossible.

At that moment her mood suddenly changed.

"There is one thing I have never told you. But for my being made so sick
when you were born, you would have had a little brother, and you would
not have been so lonesome, and perhaps everything would have been
better. But he was born dead. And now I have no one but you, and I shall
have no one else, and you are everything to me, and you must love me
very much and never leave me."

Her arms were about him, and she was crying. And soon both felt better.
But Keith had heard things he could not forget. And there was food in
them for a summer's thought.

PART IV

I

Form the very start the fifth grade was a disappointment. Once Keith,
like all the rest of the smaller boys, had looked up to it with
awe-stricken yearnings as to a peak that only a few fortunate few could
hope to climb. It was then the top of the school. Its pupils were
revered seniors--olympians tarrying momentarily among ordinary mortals
before they took flight for the exalted regions where they really
belonged. All this had been changed by the reorganization. The fifth
grade now was merely a continuation of the fourth and a stepping stone
to the sixth. And Keith's class was the first one to miss the honours of
which successive generations had dreamed as far back as the school had
existed. It was a thing no one had considered when the great news was
passed around in the spring. Now it was brought home to those most
nearly concerned with that poignancy of realization of which only youth
is capable. It gave to the whole class a peculiar atmosphere as if it
had been marked in advance for defeat. The teachers seemed to feel it,
too, and especially the old Rector, who, after so many years of supreme
command, suddenly found himself reduced to a subordinate position.