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not find him, but that _he_ had found _me_. Then my knees would fail me, I would sink down in a sweat of terror, and--wake!... Brrr!... I can see it now!" He shook himself, turning round to me as though he were suddenly ashamed of himself, with a laugh half-shy, half-retrospective. "We all have our dreams," he continued. "But this came too often--again and again. The question of death became my constant preoccupation as I grew to think I would never see it, nor hear men speak of it, nor--" "And you have come," I could not but interrupt him, "here, to the very fortress--Why, man!--" "I know," he answered, smiling at me. "It must seem to you ridiculous. But I am a different person now--very different. Now I am ready, eager for anything. Death can be nothing to me now, or if that is too bold, at least I may say that I am prepared to meet him--anywhere--at any time. I want to meet him--I want to show--" "We have all," I said, "in our hearts, perhaps, come like that--come to prove that our secret picture of ourselves, that picture so different from our friends' opinion of us, is really the true one. We can fancy them saying afterwards: 'Well, I never knew that so-and-so had so much in him!' _We_ always knew." "No, you see," Trenchard said eagerly, "there can be only one person now about whose opinion I care. If _she_ thinks well of me--" "You are very much in love," I said, and loosed, as I had expected, the torrents of his happiness upon me. "I was in Polchester when the war broke out. The town received it rather as though a first-class company had come from London to act in the Assembly Rooms for a fortnight. It was dramatic and picturesque and pleasantly patriotic. They see it otherwise now, I fancy. I seemed at once to think of Russia. For one thing I wanted desperately to help, and I thought that in England they would only laugh at me as they had always done. I am short-sighted. I knew that I should never be a soldier. I fancied that in Russia they would not say: 'Oh, John Trenchard of Polchester.... _He's_ no good!' before they'd seen whether I could do anything. Then of course I had read about the country--Tolstoi and Turgeniev, and a little Dostoevsky and even Gorki and Tchekov. I went quite suddenly, making up my mind one evening. I seemed to begin to be a new man out of England. The journey delighted me.... I was in Moscow before I knew. I was there three months trying to learn Russian. Then I c
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