The cough of Herr Stangenberg had been growing worse and worse all through the winter. He had to take to the bed more and more frequently. There had been a terrible change in his appearance. Only the eyes and his temper remained the same. He was always cheerful and hopeful. So he remained when he had to stay in bed entirely and a doctor began to pay him daily visits. 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. "I think he knows at last that the end is near," Keith's mother said as she rose to go into the parlour. "What am I going to say if he asks me?" "Nothing," replied the father quietly. "Leave that to the doctor." On her return, the mother sank down in her chair and began to grope for a handkerchief. Keith saw that her eyes were lustrous with tears. "What did he want?" asked the father with unusual anxiety. "Well, if you tried for a month, you couldn't guess it," the mother said, and as she spoke, a smile broke through her tears. "It is so sad and so funny that.... He wants me to send for his tailor to measure him for a new spring suit." "Has he no idea ...?" The father checked himself with a glance at Keith. "I know what you mean," said Keith calmly. Both parents looked at him in surprise, but neither comment nor rebuke ensued. "No," the mother went on after a while, "he says that he knows he will be well and back at his office in two weeks. He actually laughed when I tried to say something about his being very ill. It brought on his cough again, and for a moment I thought he would die then and there. But when the attack was over, he asked me if I couldn't hear that the cough was much better. What do you think I ought to do?" "Nothing," the father replied once more. Keith was ready to start for school next morning when he heard Hilda utter a startled cry in the parlour. "Fru Wellander! Fru Wellander!" she called. Before the mother had a chance to move, the frightened face of the girl appeared in the parlour door, and she whispered as if afraid of waking some one out of sleep: "He is dead." Both women hurried into the parlour. Keith stood irresolute for a moment. Then he made for the kitchen door and ran downstairs at top speed. He was afraid of missing Murray. All during that day a thought would bother his brain like a buzzing fly: how peculiar that a man could want to order a new suit of clothes a few hours before he died. There was something irrational about it that stumped him. For a moment he thought of speaking to Murray about it, but it was as if some one had put a hand firmly over his mouth every time he tried to do so. The funeral took place in a couple of days. A distant relative had turned up, very apologetic and eager to explain that his dead cousin had failed to let any one know that he was sick even. This young man, the minister, and Keith's parents were the only mourners. A single carriage sufficed. Keith never went into the parlour during those days. 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." "I won't," Keith yelled back with an amount of irritation that seemed quite out of proportion to its cause. The mother gave him an uneasy glance but left the room without saying anything at the time. As far as the boy was concerned, the incident was closed. He had never permitted it to take a real hold of his mind, and he resented anybody's attempt to bring it closer to him. Death had stopped within his own threshold, and he simply looked in the opposite direction. This attitude sprang mainly from some inner resistance so stubborn that it would not even permit itself to be discussed. In addition, his mind was engrossed with other things, and the principal significance it attached to the passing of a human life at such close quarters was the hope it held out that the parlour might remain vacant. "Were you afraid to look," the mother asked Keith on her return with the father from the cemetery. "No, I just didn't want to," the boy replied emphatically. "Why," the mother asked, studying his face with the peculiar searching glance that sometimes provoked him and sometimes filled him with a desire to bury his head in her lap and weep. "Why should I," Keith rejoined. "He was dead!"