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