I leaned back on the straw, let my arms fall and lay there, flat on my back, staring straight into the sky.... With that my mood suddenly changed. I was at peace with the whole world. To-night was again thick with a heavy burden of stars that seemed to weigh like the silver lid of some mighty box heavily down, down upon us, until trees and hills and the dim Carpathians were bent flat beneath the pressure. I lying upon my back, seeing only that sheet of stars, in my nostrils the smell of the straw, rocked by the slow dreamy motion of the wagon, was filled with an exquisite ease and lethargy. I was going into battle, was I? I was to have to-night the supreme experience of my life? It might be that to-night I should die--only last week two members of the Red Cross--a nurse and a doctor--had been killed. It might be that these stars, this straw, this quiet night were round me for the last time. It did not matter to me--nothing could touch me. My soul was somewhere far away, upon some business of its own, and how happy was my body without the soul, how contented, how undisturbed! I could fancy that I should go, thus rocking, into battle and there die before my soul had time to return to me. What would my soul do then? Find some other body, or go wandering, searching for me? A star, a flash of light like a cry of happiness or of glad surprise, fell through heaven and the other stars trembled at the sight. My wagon stopped with a jerk. Some voice asked: what the devil were we doing filling the road with our carts at the exact moment that such-and-such a Division wished to move. I heard Semyonov's voice, very cold, official and polite. Then again: "Well, in God's name, hurry then! ... taking up the road! ... hurry, I tell you!" On we jogged again. Trenchard's voice came to me: he had been, it might be, talking for some time. "And so I'm not surprised, Durward, that you thought me a terrible fool to show my feelings as I've done this last fortnight. But you don't know what it is to me--to have something at last in your hands that you've dreamed of all your life and never dared to hope for: to have it and feel that at any moment it may slip away and leave you in a worse state than you were before. I'd been wishing, these last weeks, that I'd never met her, that I'd simply come to the war by myself. But now--to-day--when she spoke to me as she did, asked me to forgive her for what happened last night, my God, Durward! _I_ to forgive _her_!... But I'll show her this very night what I can do--this very night! They'll give me a chance, won't they? It would be terrible if they didn't. Semyonov won't give me a chance if he can help it. What have I done to Semyonov that he should hate me? What have...."