He fell asleep again, and when he awoke, wakened by a heavier sound of shooting, it was almost six o'clock, and it was light. "That must be the soldiers," he thought, listening to the heavier rifle fire. He sat up in bed, and glanced about the room. "I was an ass not to keep the shutters closed," he said aloud. "A stray bullet might have come in here ... I wonder whether the shutters would stop a bullet. After all, Bibles do!..."

He could just see the Republican flag floating from the flagstaff on the roof of the College of Surgeons. "They're still there, then!" And while he sat looking at it, he heard the sound of some one, wearing heavy boots, coming down the streets, making loud clattering echoes in the silence. "That's funny!" he said. "People are going about already. Perhaps it's over ... practically over!..."

He got out of bed, and as he did so, he heard the sharp rattle of rifles, and when the echo of it had ceased, he could not hear the noise of heavy treading any more. He stood still in the centre of the room, listening, and presently he heard a groan. He ran to the window and looked out. In the roadway, beneath him, an old man was lying on his back, groaning very faintly.

"They've killed him!" Henry murmured, glancing across the road at the hotel, from which the sound of firing had come. "They didn't challenge him ... they just shot him!"

Four times, the old man groaned, and then he died. He was lying in the attitude of a young child asleep. One leg was outstretched and the other was lightly raised. His right arm was lying straight out from his body, and the hand was turned up and hollowed. Very easy and natural was his attitude, lying there in the morning light. He looked like a labourer. "Going to his work," I suppose. "Thinking little of the rebellion. Just stumping along to his job ... and then!..."

There was a bundle lying by his side, a red handkerchief that seemed to be holding food ... and flowing towards it, trickling, so slowly did it move, from his body was a little red dribble....

Henry looked at him with a feeling of curiosity and pity. He had never seen a man killed before. He had never seen any dead person, not even Mrs. Clutters, until his father died. He had purposely avoided seeing Mrs. Clutters' body ... something in the thought of death repelled him and made him reluctant to look at a corpse, and so, when he had been asked if he would like to see Mrs. Clutters, he had made some evasive reply. It had been different when his father died. He had looked on him, not as a dead man, but as his father, still, even in death, his father, able to love and be loved. When he thought of death, he thought, not of Mr. Quinn, but of Mrs. Clutters, and always it seemed to him that the dead were frightful.... But this old man, a few moments ago intent on getting to his work in time, and now, cognisant, perhaps of all the mysteries of this world, had nothing frightful about him. There was beauty in the way he was lying in the roadway ... in that careless, graceful attitude ... as if he were gratefully resting after much labour....

He looked across the roadway, and now it was plain that the shapeless thing that had looked in the dim light like paper blown to a corner by the wind, was a dead man. He, too, was lying on his back, with his legs stretched straight out and slightly parted ... and while Henry looked at him, it seemed to him that the man was familiar to him. The brown dust-coat he was wearing!... And then he remembered. It was the red-haired, angry-looking, nervous man, who had chewed his moustache and gaped about him with bloodshot eyes....

He dressed, and went downstairs. The servants were up, and moving about the house, and one of them came to him.

"Will you have your breakfast now, sir!" she asked, and when he had answered that he would, she said, "There's no milk, sir. The milkman didn't come this morning!"

"It doesn't matter," he replied. "I'll have it without!"

He went to the front of the house, while his breakfast was being prepared, and looked out of the window. In the bushes on the other side of the road, he could see a youth, crawling on his stomach, and dragging a rifle after him. He raised himself on to his knees, and glanced up at the hotel, where there were some soldiers who had been brought in during the night, and when he had raised himself, the soldiers in the upper windows saw him, and fired on him. He got up and ran across the path towards the shelter of the trees, and as he ran, the bullets spattered about him. Then he staggered ... and Henry could not see him again.