"Are you sure you can carry me?" Theresa asked as he went carefully up the stairs. "You're not very big."
"But you are very little."
"I'm going to be tall."
"Are you?" He held her close to him, pressing his cheek against hers.
"Yes, tall and willowy. I'm looking forward to it."
"That's right." He tucked her into bed.
"You won't forget about the door, will you?" She liked to feel that if anything dreadful happened she would be at once aware of it, for there was no delay and no evasion in her nature. Better be in the thick of the fight, see swords drawn and blows given, than find cold bodies in the morning, and something almost as bad as this, she dreaded. She had been dowered with a bright and fierce imagination, and had she not read the literature favoured by Bill and Bessie?
But she fell asleep to no other sounds than those which, all her life, had carried her into dreams or waked her to a new day, but to-night there began for her another phase of dreaming, one which was to endure for many years and make her sleeping hours almost as important and more adventurous than her waking ones. She dreamed of mountains and of still lake water. Very black were the rocks and the water, black and awesome, but holding peace. Sometimes she sat by the lakeside and waited; sometimes she clambered to perilous places among the rocks, and there were dangers often, people to be avoided, people with whom she must fight, but always the mountains and the water were unmoved, unruffled. They saw all things, and kept their counsel; they seemed to her, as she grew older, to be both judge and friend; they were more than the scene of her adventures; they were inseparably part of them, and when there came nights wherein nothing happened and she sat by the water without expectation, warmed with content, she knew that her happiness was not all from within, that if her dream permitted her to wander away from the precipice and the lake, a chill, like a bitter wind, would fall on her. Sometimes she made a struggle to get away, but she could never go. There was a white road somewhere, she knew, but she could not walk on it: she was a captive beside this dark and burnished mirror wherein she saw a face not like her own. In the daytime she would continue the stories begun in dreams. Very often she was a maiden fought for by savage tribes, a treasure for which men gave their lives in anguish, and at night she put her head on her pillow with a glad anticipation of horrors done for her sake. But as she grew older and the dreams themselves grew and changed their character, keeping pace with her own development, she was content to be without adventure in a place which never changed, except to be more beautiful. All other dreams were dull, unwelcome things, and if many days went by without one of these loved ones, she felt that half her life was not being lived, and then she would seek out shops where, by chance, there might be pictures in the windows to allay her hunger. She was not often fed, for such paintings as she saw were poor and unreal things, but they made her dreams more perfect. This was not in the earliest years of her new dreaming, and on this night she had but a repetition of her father's tale. She sat on a ledge of rock and she was afraid. She heard a sheep calling through the night, a stone spattering down the cliff, and she woke, wet and in fear.
"Grace," she cried—"Grace! I was falling. I'm afraid of falling. Will you hold my hand?"
"What were you dreaming of, Terry? It's all right. I've got you."