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It was above all a sense of things missed. Then he happened one afternoon, when his mother was out, to be delving with more than customary audacity among the books in his father's book case, which become more accessible through the death of their gentle-looking tenant a short while before. The cough of Herr Stangenberg had been growing worse and worse all through the winter.
When everything was nearly ready, the mother asked him if he cared to go in and have a last look at poor Herr Stangenberg before the lid was put on the coffin. Keith merely shook his head. "You had better go," Granny called from the kitchen. "I never saw him better-looking while he was alive."
Keith's mother did everything in her power to be of help, and it seemed to put her own troubles and worries more in the background. "Consumption" was a word the parents often used in discussing the case of poor Herr Stangenberg, and Keith gathered that it was something dreadful and merciless, from which escape was impossible. His attitude toward the whole matter was peculiar.
He listened to what his parents talked, but always in a spirit of utter indifference, as if what they said could have no possible bearing on his own life. One evening the servant girl her name was Hilda at the time brought word that Herr Stangenberg wanted very badly to see Fru Wellander for a few minutes.
The young man whom every one spoke of as "poor dear Herr Stangenberg" had not been dead a week, when Keith one afternoon on his return from school found himself alone in the house with Granny. His mother had gone to call on some friends, and the father would not come home from the bank for several hours.