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Rud woke out of a realistic and frightful dream. He had dreamt he was back in his mean little room in Bloomsbury. He had dreamt that he was lying awake in that knobby little bed, and trying to hold himself perfectly still, because otherwise the man in the next room might come in and beat him up. That dream instant was as clear and vivid as the actual moment. Everything came back to him. He had been shouting because of a terrifying vision of Lord Horatio Bohun and his row of thumbscrews. He had shouted as he awakened. But then the dream, after the manner of dreams, had switched away to other preoccupations. The unseen man had suddenly become Reedly, the World Marshal, loud and vast, bloodstained but indestructible, determined to get at him.

"You thought I was dead!" said Reedly. "My sort never dies."

Reedly scorched and torn, unrecognisable except for his uniform and his gaping mouth and thick moustache, and Rogers behind him, with half his face blown away. Without any top to his head and without eyes, with clenched hands and teeth and jawbone exposed, Reedly was, if anything, more frightful than ever.

When Rud had seen them they had been lying perfectly still. They had been as dead as rags. Not a kick left in them…

And here they were still in pursuit of him. Still a menace.

Gradually the dream dissolved, but for a time the fear still clung to him.

Then slowly that passed also as he recognised the lovely spaciousness of his bedroom. It was still sufficiently new to be a definite pleasure. He raised himself in the bed, stuck out his feet and rubbed his eyes. "I wish I didn't dream," he said. "There's no sense in such dreams…Reedly has been dead two years."

He considered. "Almost exactly two years. Three days short of two years."

His feet slid down to the smooth, cool, grey–green floor and he stood up and stretched his arms wide.

"Maybe I've worked my brain too hard," he thought. "These are tremendous times. Maybe presently I ought to have some kind of a rest. When did I last have a rest? When have I ever had a rest…?"

He stood still, summing up the situation.

"I've got the upper hand completely now. I've won all along the line. Why should I be troubled? Why should I have these dreams? I have only to go on…But all the same if I could have a rest. Things will not leave me alone. New resistances. New difficulties. Not so great as the old, but still they come.

"Never a rest. I can't leave it. Everything depends on me. Everyone turns to me for decision."

He walked down the steps to his balcony and his face expressed a certain grave satisfaction with the martyrdom he had brought upon himself.

He paused under the great arch of the balcony and surveyed the little table on which his breakfast was set out. He had no appetite. He reflected upon the disadvantages of strenuous greatness.

"There was a time," he reflected, "when I loved a new–laid egg."