The night-porter shuffled off. Lieutenant Lapenotiere, erect and
sombre, cast a look around the apartment, into which he had never
before been admitted. The candles lit up a large painting--a queer
bird's-eye view of Venice. Other pictures, dark and bituminous,
decorated the panelled walls--portraits of dead admirals, a sea-piece
or two, some charts. . . . This was all he discerned out in the dim
light; and in fact he scanned the walls, the furniture of the room,
inattentively. His stomach was fasting, his head light with rapid
travel; above all, he had a sense of wonder that all this should be
happening to _him_. For, albeit a distinguished officer, he was a
modest man, and by habit considered himself of no great importance;
albeit a brave man, too, he shrank at the thought of the message he
carried--a message to explode and shake millions of men in a
confusion of wild joy or grief.

For about the tenth time in those sixteen days it seemed to burst and
escape in an actual detonation, splitting his head--there, as he
waited in the strange room where never a curtain stirred. . . .
It was a trick his brain played him, repeating, echoing the awful
explosion of the French seventy-four _Achille_, which had blown up
towards the close of the battle. When the ship was ablaze and
sinking, his own crew had put off in boats to rescue the Frenchmen,
at close risk of their own lives, for her loaded guns, as they grew
red-hot, went off at random among rescuers and rescued. . . .

As had happened before when he felt this queer shock, his mind
travelled back and he seemed to hear the series of discharges running
up at short intervals to the great catastrophe. . . . To divert his
thoughts, he turned to study the view of Venice above the