at is due to the bank."

"And what are real _vaktmaestare_ doing?"

"The real ones work in government departments--not as officials, but
just as attendants--it's something you can't understand yet."

Keith nodded. He didn't understand, but the words stuck and the
understanding came later.

"And those that are not real," he persisted.

His mother laughed and patted him on the head.

"There is a lot of them," she said. "They look after coats and hats in
theatres and restaurants, and wait at dinners, and do all sorts
of things."

"Was that what grandfather was doing?"

A queer look came into his mother's eyes and sent a glow of
self-satisfaction through his whole being. The look was familiar to him
and meant that his mother was annoyed by the question but pleased with
his cleverness in thinking of it.

"No," she answered, "not exactly...."

"What did he do," asked Keith, and as he spoke he sent a look of
anticipation toward his own corner.

"He was an attendant in the big club where all the rich business-men go
to spend their evenings, and he died when I was a little girl ... have
you nothing else to ask about?"

"What was papa's father," Keith ventured after a pause.

"He worked in the royal palace." Again the mother's tone served as a
warning, but also as a goad to the boy's curiosity.

"What did he do there," he demanded eagerly.

The lines about his mother's mouth grew tighter and harder, and she
spoke as if the words hurt her--but she did not refuse to answer, and
she did not send him away:

"He was a lackey."

From the moment he began to speak, Keith had showed an unusual sense for
the value and peculiarities of words. They interested him for their own
sake, one might say. He treasured them, and he gave more thought to them
than to people. The word lackey he had heard before, and he had formed a
distinct opinion about it as not desirable.

"Then he was a servant," he blurted out.

"In a way," his mother admitted. "And we are all servants, for that
matter. But working in the king's palace is not like--working as Lena
does here, for instance."

The last part of her remark went by unheeded by Keith. His thoughts
leapt instead to his paternal grandmother--a strict and unapproachable
little lady who visited them at rare intervals dressed in a quaint old
shawl and a lace-trimmed cap. A great wonder, not unmixed with pleasure,
rose in his mind at the thought that her husband had been a sort of
ser