ad as he slept, with
nothing over him but a sheet. He lay on his side, with his face towards
the open window and one arm outside the sheet.

People easily fall into habits of sleeping. Jimmy was accustomed to
sleep for about eight hours "on end," as he put it. When he had had his
eight hours he generally woke up. If he was not obliged to get up he
often went to sleep again after an interval of wakefulness, but he
seldom slept for as much as nine hours without waking.

On this night between two o'clock and three it seemed as if a layer of
sleep were gently lifted from him. He sighed, stirred, turned over and
began to dream.

He dreamed confusedly about Dion, and there were pain and apprehension
in his dream. In it Dion seemed to be himself and yet not himself, to be
near and at the same time remote, to be Jimmy's friend and yet, in some
strange and horrible way, hostile to Jimmy. No doubt the boy was haunted
in his sleep by an obscure phantom bred of that painful impression of
the morning, when his friend had suddenly been changed in the pavilion,
changed into a tragic figure from which seemed to emanate impalpable
things very black and very cold.

In the dream Jimmy's mother did not appear as an active figure; yet the
dreamer seemed somehow to be aware of her, to know faintly that she was
involved in unhappy circumstances, that she was the victim of distresses
he could not fathom. And these distresses weighed upon him like a
burden, as things weigh upon us in dreams, softly and heavily, and with
a sort of cloudy awfulness. He wanted to strive against them for his
mother, but he was held back from action, and Dion seemed to have
something to do with this. It was as if his friend and enemy, Dion
Leith, did not wish his mother to be released from unhappiness.

Jimmy moved, lay on his back and groaned. His eyelids fluttered.
Something from without, something from a distance, was pulling at him,
and the hands of sleep, too inert, perhaps, for any conflict, relaxed
their hold upon him. Thoughts from two minds in a dark pavilion were
stealing upon him, were touching him here and there, were whispering to
him.

Another layer of sleep was softly removed from him.

He clenched his large hands--he had already the hands and feet almost
of the man he would some day grow into--and his eyes opened wide for a
moment. But they closed again. He was not awake yet.

At three o'clock he woke. He had slept for six hours in the villa