“I have had a day,” he thought. “I have never enjoyed a day so much. She is beautiful, she is marvellous, and to-morrow I shall see her again. Oh, my God, she is beautiful.”
He kept repeating this as he thought of her image with praise and blessing: he could not sleep at first because of her. At a little before midnight some rifles were fired in the streets.
“By George, rifles,” he thought. “I say, this is the heart of life.” The firing, whatever it was, stopped after a couple of minutes. In the quiet which followed, perhaps not long after twelve, he fell asleep.
VI
When he had slept for nearly a watch, he was wakened by a ticking as though the wind were shaking a slat in a Venetian blind. As the noise continued, he sat up, thinking, “Here is the breeze. I’ll have to shut my window.”
He realised, then, that the noise was from the door. It was a little light ticking noise, not unlike the gnawing of a mouse, except that it never varied nor grated.
“It’s only a death-watch,” he said. “No, it’s the breeze, rattling the door. I’ll jam it up with a piece of paper.” He turned out of bed and groped in the dark for the cover of his paper-backed novel. “I’ll wedge it up with this,” he thought. He tore off the cover and folded it into a wedge.
“By George,” he thought, suddenly, with a leaping heart. “It isn’t the door rattling, it’s somebody knocking.”
It was no doubt somebody knocking, but with a special secret midnight knock which might awaken him but alarm no other person on the corridor.
“By George,” he thought, “somebody’s tapping with finger-nails. This is romance, by George. I’ll have to be jolly careful now, or very likely I’ll have my throat cut. Who can be knocking?”