Chapter X: Part III: I (3)

He read a good deal, and he was beginning to make unauthorized visits to his father's bookcase in the parlour. There he had discovered certain volumes by one Jules Verne, and if he could only have plunged freely into these, the summer might have proved quite bearable. One day when he could not get at the books, and his mood was more than usually fretful, and his mother seemed at her lowest, she suddenly turned on him and said in a strangely bitter tone:

"All I have to go through now is your fault, Keith."

"Why," he asked dumbly, staring at her.

"Because when you came into the world you hurt me so much that I have never been well since."

"How," he demanded, and as he spoke an idea flashed through his mind that his mother might not be knowing what she said. Just how such a thing could happen was still a mystery to him, but what she said sounded so absurdly impossible.

At that moment her mood suddenly changed.

"There is one thing I have never told you. But for my being made so sick when you were born, you would have had a little brother, and you would not have been so lonesome, and perhaps everything would have been better. But he was born dead. And now I have no one but you, and I shall have no one else, and you are everything to me, and you must love me very much and never leave me."

Her arms were about him, and she was crying. And soon both felt better. But Keith had heard things he could not forget. And there was food in them for a summer's thought.