He destroyed the paper as he had done the former one, picked up his file again, and went back to work, dogged and mute and desperate.
One o'clock. He had been working for three hours now, and six of the eight bars were filed. Two more, and then, to climb———
He began to recall the former occasions when these terrible attacks had come on. The last had been the one at New Year; and he shuddered as he remembered those five nights. But that time it had not come on so suddenly; he had never known it so sudden.
He dropped the file and flung out both hands blindly, praying, in his utter desperation, for the first time since he had been an atheist; praying to anything—to nothing—to everything.
“Not to-night! Oh, let me be ill to-morrow! I will bear anything to-morrow—only not to-night!”
He stood still for a moment, with both hands up to his temples; then he took up the file once more, and once more went back to his work.
Half-past one. He had begun on the last bar. His shirt-sleeve was bitten to rags; there was blood on his lips and a red mist before his eyes, and the sweat poured from his forehead as he filed, and filed, and filed——
After sunrise Montanelli fell asleep. He was utterly worn out with the restless misery of the night and slept for a little while quietly; then he began to dream.
At first he dreamed vaguely, confusedly; broken fragments of images and fancies followed each other, fleeting and incoherent, but all filled with the same dim sense of struggle and pain, the same shadow of indefinable dread. Presently he began to dream of sleeplessness; the old, frightful, familiar dream that had been a terror to him for years. And even as he dreamed he recognized that he had been through it all before.