Summer again. The incident with Clara was forgotten. Yet Keith had a sense of being watched a little more closely than usual. He was rarely permitted to go out alone after his return from school. And he was scolded if he ever was late in coming home. There was mystery in the air. The parents talked together a good deal in a way that made Keith understand they were talking about him and did not want to be overheard. As soon as school closed the secret became revealed. He would be sent into the real country for the summer to board with perfect strangers. "Any children," was Keith's first question. Yes, a couple of sons in the house, and probably one or two more boys from the city, boarders like Keith. It seemed the thing had been planning for a long time. The mother said something about the necessity for Keith of going where everything was clean and wholesome--the air, the food, the people. The boy knew that she had been worrying about him for some reason he could not guess. An advertisement in a newspaper had led his mother on the track of what she wanted. She read it to him--"a religious family with children of their own would take a few well-behaved boys of good family for the summer months and give them a real home and as good as parental care." It turned out to be the sexton of a country parish on the northern shore of Lake Maelaren who had devised this means of eking out his probably limited professional income. The ensuing correspondence had proved quite satisfactory. The mother was evidently pleased. It was almost as good as staying with the pastor himself, she said. Keith knew what a pastor was. He had several times heard one preach from a funny hanging box in Great Church, and he thought of him as a man who was always dressed in black and who was even more serious than the father. But it did not bother him, partly because he realized that, after all, a sexton was not the same as a pastor, and partly because his mind was full of something else. It was not the country, although his previous experience of it, when he was staying with his aunt, had given him a rather favourable impression. No, what occupied him to the exclusion of everything else was the thought that he would be able to play with other children all day long, and that there would be no one to pull him away just as a game was becoming really interesting. Exciting days of preparation followed. And finally the day of departure dawned. The greater part of the journey was to be made by boat to the little town of Enköping, where Mr. Swensson, the sexton, would be waiting with a team. The mother could not go along, and so Keith was placed in the hands of some people going the same way, who promised to look after him and see that he did not fall into wrong hands when the steamer landed. Keith had to stand in the stern of the boat and wave his handkerchief as long as his mother remained visible. Then he was free, at last, to surrender himself to the novelty of his situation. And as always upon such occasions, when new impressions came crowding in upon him, the record became too blurred for clear remembrance. This was true not only of the trip on the steamer, the arrival at Enköping with its little old-fashioned red houses, the meeting with Mr. Swanson, the drive of thirty miles or more inland, the arrival at the sexton's house not far from a white spired church, and the introduction to a seemingly endless number of new faces, but of the whole long summer. A couple of months sufficed to wipe out of his memory everything but a few comparatively trivial incidents and impressions. Only one name escaped the general oblivion--that of the sexton himself. Only one view left a lasting image behind--that of a tremendously large boulder, a memento of the glacial period, that rose like a crude monument right in the centre of a tilled field almost, but not quite out of sight of the house. Only one face would come back in recognizable shape when he tried to recall that rather momentous summer--that of a boy a few years older than himself, who was the leader of all the games played around the big rock in the open field.