He thought: "Of course; this must have been what he meant."
And presently he fell asleep, exhausted and at the same time appeased.
It was morning.
Michael's sleep dragged him down; it drowned and choked him as he struggled to wake.
Something had happened. He would know what it was when he came clear out of this drowning.
Now he remembered. Nicky was killed. Last 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 Réveillaud 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.