Perhaps because he had slept for so long in the afternoon her husband was more wakeful; for hours he sat with his eyes wide and his chin propped on his hands. After nightfall had come silence from the guns and at first the only sounds were forest sounds—night-bird talk and the lapping of unseen water at his feet. Later Griselda was restless and became conversational, talking rapidly and brokenly in a delirium of pain and fever and paying no heed to his efforts to answer and calm her. Her mind, uncontrolled, had returned to a familiar channel; she was back in the world that had crumbled but yesterday, waging war as she understood it till she saw the hostages die. The Great Civil War that you fought with martyrdoms, with protests at meetings and hammers on plate-glass windows—he could hear she was back in the thick of it incoherently addressing an audience. Snatches of old-time denunciation—Asquith, McKenna, the sins of the Labour Party—and, emerging from a torrent of incomprehensibility, the names of the Leaders of the Movement. He listened, crouched in the darkness, a starving fugitive—who had seen men dismembered and done to death in a war that was not civil; and suddenly, crouched and starving in the darkness, he began to laugh out loud. He remembered—quite plainly he remembered—a letter written to the daily Press to point out with indignation that one of the Leaders of the Movement had been hurt in the ankle in the course of the Great Civil War.... He only laughed briefly; the echo of his own voice frightened him, and its cackle died swiftly away. In the grave black silence it sounded like a blasphemy, and he told himself excusingly that he had not been able to help it. With rest and cessation of movement his brain worked more easily; and with the passing of his first savage hunger he was no longer preoccupied with the needs of his empty stomach. He considered the situation, dispassionately and curiously detached from it; deciding, with an odd lack of emotion, that to-morrow could not be as to-day. Whatever the need, Griselda could walk no further; he, for his part, was incapable of dragging her; when the light came they must just sit and wait. His mind refused to trouble itself with details of what would happen if they sat and waited too long. Looking back at that night it seemed to him that he was not able to feel very much; his capacity for emotion was exhausted, even as his body. When Griselda stirred or groaned he tried to shift her more comfortably, when she gasped for water he helped her to bend down and drink; but the power of imaginative terror had left him for the time being, and he no longer trembled and sickened at her suffering as he had done when she was first struck down.