“You might have drowned,” his mother cried, too frightened to scold.  “Or you might have caught cold and died of that.  Perhaps ... you had better come home at once.”

“No,” protested Keith.  “Adolph was there, and it hasn’t been cold at all.”

“But think, Keith,” his mother remonstrated, her eyes dim with tears, “you wouldn’t care to die and leave me?”

“I don’t want to leave you,” the boy said, “and I was not going to.”

She took his head between her two hands and looked long into his eyes before she asked at last: 

“Are you not scared of death?”

“I don’t know,” he stammered, wincing slightly under her stare.  He could not grasp what she was driving at.  Death carried no clear meaning to him.  It had never touched his real inner 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.