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.