r life, and he never thought of
it. No matter how frightened he became, it never occurred to him that he
might cease to exist. Even his dreams had no colouring of that kind.

In spite of his mother's anxiety, he learned to swim that summer. He
liked it and did it rather well for his age. But he never ventured very
far out. Rebel as he might against the check on his movements, his
mother's attitude had left a lasting mark on him, and avoiding needless
risks seemed a natural thing to him. As a result of this inhibition, all
his outdoor playing lacked that complete abandon which is the soul of
it. He been made an indoor child beyond retrieve.

XIX

Being so much in the open air and moving about as a child should, his
nights during that summer passed mostly without dreams of any kind, and
also without other disturbances worth speaking of. He was too healthily
tired for anything but sleep.

The winter nights, following days spent largely indoors with little
company and less exercise, were quite different. Then the passing from
wakefulness to sleep took him through a dangerous twilight period, when
games of the kind learned behind the big rock seemed not only natural,
but the most enticing thing in the world. And the more he was thrown
back on his own resources, the more tempting those games became. They
represented, besides, something that was entirely his own, with which no
one else could interfere. It was a secret that would have been the
sweeter for being shared with some one else, he felt, but Johan's
peculiar attitude in this matter had filled him with a shyness not his
own by nature.

Then, with the sleep, came also the dreams. At first they were, or
seemed to be, mere plays of fancy--shadowy repetitions of daylight
experiences in clownish distortion. Then they began to change. An
element of unrest, and finally of dread, began to fill them. This did
not happen, however, until the same elements had found a place in his
waking life, and particularly not until the hours of that twilight
period had developed into a source of increasingly acute conflict.

Nothing palpable had happened. Nothing had been said openly to convince
him that his secret was known and that it was evil. Yet the air about
him seemed full of suspicion and suspense and menace. The mere way in
which his mother looked at him at times filled his soul with sinister
misgivings. And she was always talking about temptations and dangers
that walk in