And then, he was awake. The obsession of the early evening was still foremost in his mind: that he must stay awake for Jonas--to greet Jonas as he came to the big bed. He was unconscious utterly that he had slept. The one cessation of which he was aware was of the horrors--of the voices and the forms and the green light. He lay quite still, half-expecting their return. They seemed so essential and fateful a part of a life alone. But a strange peace filled the room. It contained no fears, no visions. It seemed to be shaping calmly, rhythmically. It became a personality. And it was resting. What was that?--yes, the room was even breathing. Surely, softly, continuously it came--the breathing. Quincy lay wonder-struck in bed. How was this? It had not the stuff of a dream, nor of such forms as the gold-green monster he had discovered by the window. This was _real_! He sat up in his cot. The breathing came and came. If only Jonas--. A thought flashed, and the child looked toward the bed. There it stood, huge, looming above the shadows. And in it, a lack of precision, then a sense of form, a concrete sense of breathing. Jonas was there. The mystery of how, did not distress him. Quincy accepted the glad wonder without question. For a long time, he sat up, drinking it in, basking in his new sure dominion of the room. And then, he sank back upon his pillow into sleep.... * * * * * Still, there were disquieting things to be observed in Jonas. His attitude toward the family was in one case at least radically wrong. He and father seemed on the point of becoming chums! That autumn, already, Jonas had been allowed to follow on a snipe-shooting expedition. He was full, even now, of his father’s prowess--big, burly, muscular man that he was--in laying low the little sand-skipping creatures that seemed less bird than insect. And now, not long after Quincy’s eighth birthday, when the weather was still a grumbling discord of cold and ice and when still, one went to bed in the dark, Jonas was taken on a trip to New York. He was away an interminable time--from early breakfast until bed-time. And he returned inarticulately stuffed with wonder and importance. What had transpired and in what respect New York was dissimilar to Harriet, Long Island, Quincy could not ascertain. “Oh, you wouldn’t understand,” said Jonas. “It’s all a holler and a racket and a lot o’ stone towers where people live and you’re jigged up and down in elevators.” For his superiority, Quincy forgave him. But when he observed: “Dad and me ’tended to business together,” Quincy disliked the association. Nor could his remark, couched in a prophetic voice: “We are goin’ to be rich, we are. Dad tol’ me,” wipe out the evil taste. The announcement indeed meant far less than the promise of half an orange.