Most of all he dreaded the dormitory; for here the abandonment of clothes laid him open to particularly painful forms of oppression; the shock and horror of bedclothes ragged just as he was falling off to sleep; the numbing swing of a pillow, the lancinating flick of wet towels; Oh!—a hell of a life, only to be terminated by the arrival of Layton, who had the privilege of sitting up till eleven, with black rings round his spectacled eyes. He was reading for a scholarship at Cambridge. Then Ingleby would really get off to sleep, or sometimes, if he were too excited, watch the moonlight, broken by the stone mullions of the windows, whiten the long washing-table and cast blue shadows so intense that they heightened the bareness of the dormitory; or else he would listen to the harsh breathing of Douglas, who slept with his mouth open, and wonder what all those heavy sleepers were dreaming of, or if they dreamed at all. And then his own magic casements were opened. At St. Luke’s he had discovered the trick—quite a new thing for him—of historical dreaming. His form were busy with the age of the Stuarts, under the direction of a master named Leeming, a mild-eyed cleric, rather shy of boys and feverishly grateful whenever he sprung a response to his own enthusiasms. Ingleby drank deep of the period’s romance, and this heady wine coloured his dreams. He would dream sometimes of the tenanted oak of Boscobel, watching with agony the movements of the Roundhead searchers; sometimes he would stand elbowing in the crowd about that scaffold at Whitehall, when the martyr king stepped out. The man at his left hand had been eating garlic. Ha!—a Frenchman. One of those musketeers! . . . He would tremble with delight. He wished that he could tell Mr. Leeming of his dreams, but they were far too precious to risk being bruised by laughter or unconcern. All night long this queer panoramic rubbish would go seething through his brain, until, at six-fifteen, one of the waiters swung a harsh bell outside the dormitory door and he would turn over, trying to piece together the thin stuff that its clangour had so suddenly broken, until the _ten-bell_ rang, and the rush for early school began. He grew to love the winter terms because the darkness lasted longer.