He missed those little friends of his, especially Jane, with her quick ways and eager loyalty, which made her so companionable, though never tiresomely clinging, as is the way with admiring children. He had not known how much they had come to mean to him during this last year in which they had been his constant companions, until they had gone away and he had been left to the society of his elders. Between him and Wilbraham, especially, there was some community of taste. He owed a good deal of his love of fine literature to Wilbraham, and there was much that he could share with him that was beyond the understanding of the children. They were only children, and he had told them none of his secret thoughts. Jane was very quick of understanding, and had developed considerably during the year he had known her; perhaps he might have come to confide some of them to her if they had ever been alone together. But Pobbles was her inseparable shadow, and he had never wanted it otherwise. With all their immaturity, they appealed to the spirit of youth in him, and their companionship gave him something that he could not get from his elders. That was why he missed them so much on this wild wet afternoon, when he was debarred from his usual pursuits out of doors, and there seemed to be nothing worth doing indoors. And yet it was not them so much that he missed—though he did not know it—as the companionship and inspiration of answering youth. Perhaps they had had something to do with arousing the need of it in him, but they were too young to satisfy it. He had been supremely happy in his childhood and youth—far more consistently happy than most boys of his age, and happier than he consciously knew. But the time for that life was coming to an end; unless some change came to him he would gain less and less contentment from it as he grew older. He had not yet grasped the magnitude of the change that was even then all around him, and would soon draw him, as an atom in the whole sensitive world, into its vortex. For the great war had begun. As Harry stood at the window, the German hordes were over-running Belgium and France, England was hurrying feverishly into the breach, throughout the length and breadth of the country nothing else was talked of but the war; only here and there in some remote place the menace of the great conflagration was unheeded as yet; but very soon there would be no place where its weight did not fall.