“How do you know?”
Launce shuffled in the sand. There was nothing she might not have of him when she used that voice. He would have told her of his fight with the red-haired boy, of the cave behind the summer-house, even of the humiliating fact that he still kept, secretly, at the bottom of his play-box, a shapeless wooden doll called Ephraim. Now she lightly asked of him a harder thing—his dreams. Well, she should have them.
“I think he is not really asleep, the little faun. Aunt Lucy, I think in the night, the quiet dark night, he wakes up.”
“He wakes up—?”
“Yes. He’s not very clever. He does not know where he is. But he can do things.”
“What things, little boy?”
“I don’t quite know. But he knows something, and they know too. I think I’ve seen, Aunt Lucy—I’m almost sure I’ve seen. I think he calls things. He wakes and calls. It is like music, but there is no sound. It is like dancing, but he does not move. Only he is awake, somehow, inside the stone. And last night, when the moon came out between the clouds, I saw the rabbits dance on the path, and other things, too—”
“What things?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Launce desperately. “I fell asleep on the window-sill. Little queer things out of the larch-plantation, but all alive and dancing.”
“Dancing—?”