Sunday. He knew that. But that
wasn't all of it. There was something else that followed on--

Suddenly his mind leaped on it. He was going out. He would be killed
too. And because he was going out, and because he would be killed, he
was not feeling Nicky's death so acutely as he should have thought he
would have felt it. He had been let off that.

He lay still a moment, looking at the thing he was going to do, feeling
a certain pleasure in its fitness. Drayton and Reveillaud and Lawrence
had gone out, and they had been killed. Ellis and Mitchell and
Monier-Owen were going out and they would certainly be killed. Wadham
had gone out and young Vereker, and they also would be killed.

Last Sunday it was Nicky. Now it must be he.

His mind acknowledged the rightness of the sequence without concern. It
was aware that his going depended on his own will. But never in all his
life had he brought so little imagination to the act of willing.

He got up, bathed in the river, dressed, and ate his breakfast. He
accepted each moment as it arrived, without imagination or concern.

Then his mother's letter came. Frances wrote, among other things: "I
know how terribly you will be feeling it, because I know how you cared
for him. I wish I could comfort you. We could not bear it, Michael, if
we were not so proud of him."

He answered this letter at once. He wrote: "I couldn't bear it either,
if I were not going out. But of course I'm going now."

As he signed himself, "Your loving Michael," he thought: "That settles
it." Yet, if he had considered what he meant by settling it he would
have told himself that he meant nothing; that last night had settled it;
that his resolution had been absolutely self-determined and absolutely
irrevocable then, and that his signature gave it no more sanctity or
finality than it had already. If he was conscript, he was conscript to
his own will.

He went out at once with his letter, though he knew that the post did
not leave Renton for another five hours.

It was the sliding of this light thing and its fall into the letter-box
that shook him into realization of what he had done and of what was
before him. He knew now why he was in such a hurry to write that letter
and to post it. By those two slight acts, not dreadful nor difficult in
themselves, he had put it out of his power to withdraw from the one
supremely difficult and dreadful act. A second ago, while the letter was
still in his hands, he c