Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/21

 "Because, Donald," his mother answered him, kissing him good-night, "if Santa Claus sees you looking at him, he'll fly away and not leave you anything." He made no reply—being confused with much thought.

Their bedroom—Frankie's and his—had been moved to the top of the house to protect the slumbers of the new baby in the nursery. Their playroom had been built for a billiard-room, and it was divided from the bedroom by a pair of large folding doors with glasses newly frosted. Don had once licked at that frosting in a mistaken idea that it was the same as the icing of a cake. Finding it tasteless, he had scratched at it with a penknife, and so had made a peephole which he had since used when hiding from Miss Morris.

Now, just as he was falling asleep—he had explained that phrase "falling asleep" to himself by imagining a physical sensation of falling through the floor with his bed, and so induced sleep by confusing his brain with the whirl and giddiness of his descent—now, when the bed was well through the floor and was beginning to rock gently down to "Slumberland," the thought of this peephole in the frosted door came to him with a vividness of suggestion that might have made it seem, to an older mind, a prompting of the devil. It came with all the terrifying seductiveness, the fear and fascination, of a tempting against conscience. Santa Claus was to be in the playroom, on the other side of the glass doors. Their stockings had been hung there for him, and the peephole was on that side of the room on which he would leave his gifts.

Don started up in his bed, and gazed at the squares