"Hush," cried Keith's mother with a quick glance at the boy who was
taking in everything with wide-open eyes and ears.

Keith did not wait for anything more, but sneaked off by himself to
think. The change of the name seemed nothing at the time, but the
suggestion that his great-grandfather had been hanged was startling
enough to give food for many meditations. Fortunately, or unfortunately,
his aunt's manner had been too nonchalant to give him any clues. And
from the manner of his mother he gathered merely that the asking of
questions would be useless. So it came about that Keith for the first
time in his life regretted the premature death of his paternal
grandfather, from whom, otherwise, he might have elicited some more
satisfactory information.

Both grandfathers were dead long before Keith was born. He never saw a
portrait of either of them, or had an idea of how they looked. He could
not even recall having heard their Christian names. The personality of
his paternal grandfather always remained a total blank to him. Of the
other one he knew a little more. The fashionable club where his mother's
father served was notorious for its conviviality and reckless gambling,
and the men were like the masters to some extent. This one of his
grandfathers used to love wine, women, cards and everything else that
helped to modify life's general drabness. He must have been something of
a wit, too, in his own circles, having any number of boon companions.
Keith never heard what kind of a man he was at home. He made good money
while he lived and spent it as carelessly as he earned it. At forty-two
he died, leaving a penniless widow to look after a daughter still in her
early teens. Keith's paternal grandfather died in the same way, but his
widow, who was a hard-headed little woman of old peasant stock--the best
in Sweden--did better with four children than the other grandmother