"As it happened," continued Mr. Morgan, no longer white, but very red, "he wasn't killed in an advance, or anything grand. He told me to tell you, so I am telling you. He was killed by a sniper while he was setting a trap of his own invention to catch the rats as they came over the parapet. He was shot in the chest very early yesterday morning, and he lived about four hours. He was not in much pain, he even laughed a little once or twice to think he should have lived and died so consistently. He told me that he had never seen a moment's real romantic fighting; he had never once felt patriotic or dramatic or dutiful, he said. He wandered a little, I think, because he seemed worried about the rats that might be caught in the trap he had set. He seemed to mix up the rats and the Boches. He said that these creatures didn't know they were vermin, they just thought they were honest average animals doing their bit, and then suddenly killed by a malignant chaos. My notes are very hurried. I am afraid I am repeating myself." Jay remembered the mouse they once caught, and kept in a bottle for a day, and the palace they made for it out of stones and mud and moss, and the sun-bath of patted mud they made by the door of the palace. But the mouse, when it was installed, flashed straight out of the front door, and jumped the sun-bath, and knocked down a daisy, and was never seen again. But Jay and Kew used to believe that on moonlit nights it came back to the palace, and brought its wife and children, and was grateful to the palace builders. "A few days before he was killed," said Mr. Morgan, "he told me that he had lied so successfully all his life that quite a lot of people thought him a most admirable young man. He said Anonyma once brought him into a book, and when he read that book he saw how lying paid, as long as one didn't lie to absolutely everybody. He said if he died Anonyma would write something very nice upon his memorial brass about a pure heart or everlasting life, and he thought you would smile a little at that. He said that he remembered going home with you in a 'bus and seeing on the window of the 'bus a text that promised everlasting life on certain conditions. He said the remembrance of that text tired him still. He said he had had too much of himself, he had known himself too well, and when death came, he wanted it to be an honest little death with no frills, and after that an everlasting sleep with no dreams. I am putting it all in the wrong order. I shall make you despise me. You talk so well yourself."