We sailed two days later, and I did not see Milsom again before we left. He had walked part of the way back with me when, somewhere in the sma' hours, that hectic guest night drew to a close. We parted at the head of a dry dock, where a Light Cruiser was lying shored up in the midst of an abyss of shadows, and for a moment Milsom leaned over the guard rail and stared down the tiers of smooth masonry into the darkness beneath us. "Hornby," he said, "I wish I had my mother's clearness of vision. I feel somehow that you and I are on the eve of something--an awfully big adventure of sorts." "I feel it now," went on Milsom, staring down into the dock with its flights of giant steps of granite, and speaking in a low voice. "It's a sort of--sort of pricking of the thumbs!" The beam of an inquisitive searchlight on one of the harbour defences swung round and for an instant dazzled us, painted the objects round us ebon and silver, and passed. Milsom straightened up. "Stonework and searchlights..." he said, as if repeating a half-forgotten lesson. "Stonework and searchlights and darkness beneath.... Oh, I wish I knew! I wish I knew!" Then abruptly his mood changed. He broke into one of his delightful laughs, fetched his right hand out of his pocket and slapped me on the shoulderblade. "Sleep well!" he cried. "Sleep tight--and don't let the bogies bite!" That was the last I saw of him. 5 We had been back at the Grand Fleet Base nearly a fortnight, and leave had slipped into the limbo of the past. The usual after-effects of a spell at a dockyard were beginning to be apparent: the married men were cheering up and the bachelors were showing feverish interest in the mails. We had a racing cutter in training and a gunnery programme under way that Guns vowed was going to bring him in grey hairs and sorrow to the grave. Then one busy morning when I had mapped out a nice little programme for myself, the Boatswain and the Captain of the Side going round the ship in a skiff, the Skipper sent for me in the after-cabin. "Hornby," he said, "what are your plans for the future?" I stared at him a bit. I'd only been promoted three years, and I wasn't worrying about a Command. I felt I was doing pretty good work where I was, and the ship, though perhaps I say it what shouldn't, didn't figure badly in the Squadron Returns. However, I decided he was contemplating a change of Commanders and was sorry, because he was a White Man. "Plans, sir," I said. "I don't know that I have worried much about making plans. I believe in going where I'm sent and leaving it at that." He nodded with his dry smile and picked up a telescope off his desk. "I know you won't think I'm butting into your private affairs, Hornby, or being inquisitive"--he focused the glass through a port on a distant cutter under sail--"but are you by any chance thinking of getting married again?" "No," I said.