-lines upon the sky now washed with
pink, covered in their nearer reaches by thick forests, insubstantial,
although they were close at hand, like water or long clouds. We could
see the road, white and clear at our feet, melting into shadow beyond
us, and catching in the little misty pools the coloured reflection of
the morning sky.

The air was very fresh; a cock behind me welcomed the sun; the cold
band withdrew from my forehead.

Nikitin was silent and I, silent also, sat there, almost asleep, happy
and tranquil. It seemed to me very natural to him that he should
neither move nor speak, but after a time he began to talk. I had in
that early morning a strange impression, as though deep in my dreams I
was listening to some history. I know that I did not sleep and yet
even now as I recover his quiet voice and, I believe, many of his very
words, in reminiscence those hours are still dreaming hours. I know
that every word that he told me then was true in actual fact. And yet
it seems to me that we were all slumbering, the world at our feet, the
sun in the sky, the wounded in their tent, and that through the mist
of all that slumber Nikitin's voice, soft, measured, itself like an
echo of some other voice miles away, penetrated--but to my heart
rather than to my brain. Afterwards this was all strangely parallel in
my mind with that earlier conversation that I had had with Trenchard
in the train.... And now as I sit here, in so different a place,
amongst men so different, those other two come back to me, happy
ghosts. Yes, happy I know that one at least of them is!

Like water behind glass, like music behind a screen, Nikitin's voice
comes back to me--dim but so close, mysterious but so intimate. Ah,
the questions that I would ask him now if only I might have those
morning hours over again!

"You're a solemn man altogether, Durward. Perhaps all Englishmen seem
so to us, and it may be only your tranquillity, so unlike our moods
and nerves by which we kill ourselves dead before we're half way
through life.... I had an English tutor for a year when I was a boy.
He didn't teach me much: 'all right' and 'Tank you' is the only
English I've kept, but I think of him now as the very quietest man in
all the universe. He never seemed to breathe, so still he was. And how
I admired him for that! My father was a very excitable man, his moods
and tempers killed him when he was just over forty.... We have a
proverb, 'In the still marshe