“No? Then,” said the old woman, “he is killed.”  And she began to cry.

Michael couldn’t stand that.  He got up and opened the door into the outer room, and she passed through before him, sobbing and whimpering.  Her voice came to him through the closed door in a sharp cry telling Jean that Monsieur Nicky was dead, and Jean’s voice came, hushing her.

Then he heard the feet of the old man shuffling across the kitchen floor, and the outer door opening and shutting softly; and through the windows at the back of the room, he saw, without heeding, as the Belgians passed and went up into the fields together, weeping, leaving him alone.

They had remembered.

It was then that Michael read the Colonel’s letter, and learned the manner of his brother’s death:  “...  About a quarter past four o’clock in the afternoon his battalion was being pressed back, when he rallied his men and led them in as gallant an attack as was ever made by so small a number in this War.  He was standing on the enemy’s parapet when he was shot through the heart and fell.  By a quarter to five the trench was stormed and taken, owing to his personal daring and impetus and to the affection and confidence he inspired....  We hear it continually said of our officers and men that ‘they’re all the same,’ and I daresay as far as pluck goes they are.  But, if I may say so, we all felt that your son had something that we haven’t got....”

* * * * *

Michael lay awake in the bed that had been his brother’s marriage bed.  The low white ceiling sagged and bulged above him.  For three nights the room had been as if Nicky and Veronica had never gone from it.  They had compelled him to think of them.  They had lain where he lay, falling asleep in each other’s arms.

The odd thing had been that his acute and vivid sense of them had in no way troubled him.  It had been simply there like some exquisite atmosphere, intensifying his peace.  He had had the same feeling he always had when Veronica was with him.  He had liked to lie with his head on their pillow, to touch what they had touched, to look at the same things in the same room, to go in and out through the same doors over the same floors, remembering their hands and feet and eyes, and saying to himself:  “They did this and this”; or, “That must have pleased them.”

It ought to have been torture to him; and he could not imagine why it was not.

And now, on this fourth night, he had no longer that sense of Nicky and Veronica together.  The room had emptied itself of its own memory and significance.  He was aware of nothing but the bare, spiritual space between him and Nicky.  He lay contemplating it steadily and without any horror.

He thought:  “This ends it.  Of course I shall go out now.  I might have known that this would end it. He knew.”

He remembered how Nicky had come to him in his room that night in August.  He could see himself sitting on the side of his bed, half-dressed, and Nicky standing over him, talking.