But the conclusion of the first breathless three months found him amazingly fit and happy. His mind was stored with newly-acquired and vastly interesting knowledge. The beagles and football sweated the "callow suet" off him and gave him the endurance of a lean hound. He was fitting into the new life as a hand into a well-worn glove. The end of his second term brought the coveted triangular badge on the right cuff that marks the Cadet Captain among his fellows. The duties (which are much the same as those of monitor or prefect) offered him his first introduction to the peculiar essence we call tact, necessary in dealing with contemporaries. About this time began his friendship with Jubbs. This young gentleman’s real name was as unlike his sobriquet as anything could be; among a community of Naval Cadets this was perhaps a sufficient _raison d’être_: anyhow none other was ever forthcoming. They earned their "Rugger" colours together as scrum and stand-off halves, and as time went on a slow friendship matured and knit between them. Their first sight of each other had been in the hotel the evening before joining. Thenceforward it pleased the power that is called Destiny to run the brief threads of their lives together to the end. At the close of their third term they became Chief Cadet Captains, and Jubbs’ papa, a long, lean baronet with a beak-like nose, came down to attend the prize-giving. At the conclusion of the ceremony he was piloted to the Canteen, where the Cadet Captains were pleased to "stodge" at his expense, while he—as one who sits at meat among the gods—trumpeted his satisfaction into a flaring bandana handkerchief. At the end of the fourth and last term Jerry’s mother came down to see the last prize-giving, and thus was present when her son received the King’s Medal. For one never-to-be-forgotten moment she watched him turn from the dais and come towards her, erect and rather pale, with compressed lips. But the cheering broke from the throats of three hundred inveterate hero-worshippers like a tempest, and then a mist hid him from her sight. *III.* A P. & O. liner, a few months later, carried Jerry and Jubbs to China. During the voyage they came in contact with a hitherto unrecognised factor in life, and found themselves faced with unforeseen perplexities. One evening, as they leaned over the rail experimenting gingerly with two cigars, Jubbs unburdened himself. "... Besides, they jaw such awful rot," was his final summary of feminine allurements. Jerry nodded, tranquil-eyed. "I know. I told Mrs What’s-her-name—that woman with the ear-rings—that I’d got one mother already; and as I’m going to China, and she’s going to India, I didn’t see the use of being tremendous friends. ’Sides, she’s as old as the hills."