ower seeds; first one bone then
another ached, in the centre of my back there was an intolerable
irritation; above all, there was in my brain some strange insistent
compulsion, as though some one were forcing me to remember something
that I had forgotten, or as though again some one were fore-warning me
of some peril or complication. I had, very distinctly, that
impression, so familiar to all of us, of passing through some
experience already known: I had seen already the dim lamp, the square
patch of evening sky, Nikitin, Andrey Vassilievitch.... I knew that in
a moment Trenchard.... He did.... He touched my arm.

"Can you sleep?" he whispered.

"No," I answered.

"It's terribly hot, close--smell.... Are you going to sleep?"

"No," I whispered back again.

"Let us move into the corridor. It will be cooler there."

There seemed to me quite a new sound of determination and resolve in
his voice. His nervousness had left him with the daylight. He led the
way out of the carriage, turned down the little seats in the corridor,
provided cigarettes.

"It isn't much better here, but we'll have the window open. It'll get
better. This is really war, isn't it, being so uncomfortable as this?
I feel as though things were really beginning."

"Well, we shall be there to-morrow night," I answered him. "I hope
you're not going to be disappointed."

"Disappointed in what?" His voice was quite sharp as he spoke to me,
"You don't know what I want."

"I suppose you're like the rest of us. You want to see what war really
is. You want to do some good if you can. You want to be seriously
occupied in it to prevent your thinking too much about it. Then,
because you're English, you want to see what the Russians are really
like. You're curious and sympathetic, inquisitive and, perhaps, a
little sentimental about it.... Am I right?"

"No, not quite--there are other things. I'd like to tell you. Do you
mind," he said suddenly looking up straight into my face with a
confiding smile that was especially his own, "if I talk, if I tell you
why I've come? I've no right, I don't know you--but I'm so happy
to-night that I _must_ talk--I'm so happy that I feel as though I
shall never get through the night alive."

Of our conversation after this, or rather of _his_ talk, excited,
eager, intimate and shy, old and wise and very, very young, I remember
now, I think, every word with especial vividness. After events were to
fix it all in my brain wi