"Only a little bit?" he echoed doubtfully. A very small illumination was in its eerie effect almost worse than absolute darkness.
"It isn't healthy to sleep with a great deal of light," said his mother.
"Well, how much could I have? Just for once not a crocus, but a tulip. And of course not a violet."
Mark always thought of the gas-jets as flowers. The dimmest of all was the violet; followed by the crocus, the tulip, and the water-lily; the last a brilliant affair with wavy edges, and sparkling motes dancing about in the blue water on which it swam.
"No, no, dearest boy. You really can't have as much as that. And now snuggle down and go to sleep again. I wonder what made you wake up?"
Mark seized upon this splendid excuse to detain his mother for awhile.
"Well, it wasn't ergzackly a dream," he began to improvise. "Because I was awake. And I heard a terrible plump and I said 'what can that be?' and then I was frightened and. . . ."
"Yes, well, my sweetheart, you must tell Mother in the morning."
Mark perceived that he had been too slow in working up to his crisis and desperately he sought for something to arrest the attention of his beloved audience.
"Perhaps my Guardian Angel was beside me all the time, because, look! here's a feather."