the most wonderful hair that reached to her feet when she let it down."

"But, why didn't she tell somebody?" Keith insisted, his blood running
hot with wrath at the injustice to which Granny had been submitted.

"Oh, because ..." said his mother wearily, "because your grandmother
has always been peculiar in that way when she knew she was being
wronged. 'What is the use?' she says. And then word came that her father
had gone bankrupt and had died soon after. No one seemed to pay the
least attention to her. She stayed where she was, and she couldn't work
any harder than she had done all the time. But when she was to be
confirmed, and had to go to church every week with all the other
children of her own age, she was the poorest of them all, both in fact
and in appearance, she didn't have one person in the world to whom she
could turn. She has told me that she used to lie awake nights crying and
thinking of running away, but she couldn't make up her mind to
that either."

She stopped, and Keith waited in vain for the rest of the story.

"And then," he urged.

"Oh, then she came to Stockholm and married your grandfather--my papa,
you know. And now Lena is waiting for me to tell her what we are to have
for dinner."

Keith went back to his own corner for a while. Then he made a dash for
the kitchen, where he found Granny seated in her usual place peeling
potatoes. Having placed a smaller foot-stool beside the large one in
which she was seated, he got up on it so that he could put both arms