Pat spoke in the simplest good faith, whilst Jim passed his hand across his eyes, and then looked down at the small figure beside him, rather as though he were not sure that it was not all a dream after all. Pat was not altogether sure of this either. It was certainly very queer to be up in the middle of the night just under the great lamp, sitting hand in hand with Jim and talking about being friends. He looked up into the rough face above him and smiled as he said—
"Jim, do you think we are both dreaming?"
"Jim opened a door close by."—[Page 35.]
"It seems almost like it, little master," answered the man; "but we'll go out into the gallery, and get a breath of fresh air. That's the best thing to wake one up if one is getting be-fogged."
Pat was delighted at this notion. He knew that there was an outside gallery running all round the glass house where the lamp lived. He had seen it from the boat when his father had rowed him out a little way in the evenings; but he had never been out on it before, and to go there at night for the first time seemed a very wonderful thing to do. He would see how the sea looked from up there in the moonlight; and perhaps Jim would be able to tell him how the sun managed to swim round from one side to the other before morning, and why it always came up in just the same place every day, and went down in the same place every night. Jim must know a lot of things, living so much up there, he thought.
So Jim got up and opened a door close by, and a breath of cold wind came rushing into the warm room under the big lamp. Pat looked wonderingly out into the black darkness, and shivered a little, holding Jim's hand fast in his small tenacious clasp. And then Jim, all in a moment, shuffled somehow out of his warm rough pilot coat, and wrapped it round the child's thin frame, and lifting him bodily in his strong arms, carried him out into the still calm night, shutting the door behind him as he went, that the draught might not make the lamp flicker or flare.