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 the dark.  Or else she dropped mysterious warnings about the duty of keeping one’s soul and body clean and pure.

It was all very disturbing, and he should have liked to ask questions, but always some imperious force within himself kept him back.  He felt that his sweet secret would never bear open discussion, but the more desperately he clung to it, the more his mind was poisoned with doubts out of which soon grew fears.

Thus began the new dream life.

He was as a rule the only living being in those dreams.  Everything else consisted of lifeless things, and mostly of spaces and dimensions rather than of objects.  The dominant characteristic was an increase of size proportional to the increase of distance from himself.  He found himself, for instance, in the midst of a vast space laid out in squares.  Where he stood at the centre, those squares were just large enough to hold him.  Then, as his glance passed outward, the squares became larger and larger, until at last their dimensions became gigantic.  Soon they began to move toward him, growing smaller as they approached, and yet filling his soul with a horror based entirely on the monstrous size of those squares that were still miles away.  Or he walked down a corridor built of stones that, as it opened out in front of him, expanded indefinitely until it assumed proportions that filled him with a sickening sense of his own smallness.  As he moved forward, the corridor automatically contracted, but always the horror of those immeasurable vastnesses still ahead of him continued dominant and inevitable.  At other times sums of figures came moving toward him from every direction, and the farther away from him they were, the more enormous they grew, until his mind no longer could take them in, and his heart quaked at the thought that sooner or later one of them would reach him in its original awe-inspiring immensity.

He tried once to tell his mother about those dreams, but found it impossible to express what he wished to describe.  Not long afterwards he was aroused in the middle of the night by his mother calling him by name.  Her voice betrayed worry.

“What’s the matter, Keith,” she asked when at last he woke up sufficiently to answer her call.  “Were you dreaming?”

“I don’t know,” replied the boy, and at that moment he didn’t know.

“I thought first you were crying,” explained the mother, “and then I heard that you were counting something.”

“He was probably repeating his multiplication table,” muttered the father.  “I wish he would learn his lessons in the daytime, so that we could sleep in peace at night.”