The hours went on, whether swiftly or slowly he did not consider.  The wind fell, and for some minutes a heavy shower of rain plumped vertically into the trench.  Once during it a sudden illumination blazed in the sky, and he saw the pebbles in the wall opposite shining with the fresh-falling drops.  There were a dozen rifle-shots and he saw the sentry who had just passed brushing the edge of his coat against Michael’s hand, pause, and look out through the spy-hole close by, and say something to himself.  Occasionally he dozed for a little, and woke again from dreaming of Sylvia, into complete consciousness of where he was, and of that superb joy that pervaded him.  By and by these dozings grew longer, and the intervals of wakefulness less, and for a couple of hours before he was roused he slept solidly and dreamlessly.

His spell of duty began before dawn, and he got up to go his rounds, rather stiff and numb, and his sleep seemed to have wearied rather than refreshed him.  In that hour of early morning, when vitality burns lowest, and the dying part their hold on life, the thrill that had possessed him during the earlier hours of the night, had died down.  He knew, having once felt it, that it was there, and believed that it would come when called upon; but it had drowsed as he slept, and was overlaid by the sense of the grim, inexorable side of the whole business.  A disconcerting bullet was plugged through a spy-hole the second after he had passed it; it sounded not angry, but merely business-like, and Michael found himself thinking that shots “fired in anger,” as the phrase went, were much more likely to go wide than shots fired calmly. . . .  That, in his sleepy brain, did not sound nonsense:  it seemed to contain some great truth, if he could bother to think it out.

But for that, all was quiet again, and he had returned to his dug-out, just noticing that the dawn was beginning to break, for the clouds overhead were becoming visible in outline with the light that filtered through them, and on their thinner margin turning rose-grey, when the alarm of an attack came down the line.  Instantly the huddled, sleeping bodies that lay at the side of the trench started into being, and in the moment’s pause that followed, Michael found himself fumbling at the butt of his revolver, which he had drawn out of its case.  For that one moment he heard his heart thumping in his throat, and felt his mouth grow dry with some sudden panic fear that came from he knew not where, and invaded him.  A qualm of sickness took him, something gurgled in his throat, and he spat on the floor of the trench.  All this passed in one second, for at once he was master of himself again, though not master of a savage joy that thrilled him—­the joy of this chance of killing those who fought against the peace and prosperity of the world.  There was an attack coming out of the dark, and thank God, he was among those who had to meet it.