“I know,” John said, reading his thought. “I hate wasting leave in sleep. Even if I turn out late, I like to wake early, and imagine the Reveille sounding and the calling of ‘Guard an’ steerage.’ ‘Show-a-leg, show-a-leg, lash up and sto-ow!’--and you lying in bed, with the whole day before you--away from the ship.” “This being Friday,” Hugh observed, “we have to-night, and Saturday night, and Sunday night--two clear days.” “I wonder what would happen if we didn’t go back--if we hid somewhere and never went back--if we started on our own. Why should we go back?” John said, for the sake of saying it. “If we didn’t, we’d be caught. If we weren’t caught, we’d starve.... The extraordinary thing is,” Hugh went on, in a puzzled voice, “that we can’t stay as we are. I’m happy as can be sitting here; yet I shall get up presently and put an end to this evening by going to bed. I don’t want to move. It’s glorious here in the dark.... Look at the lawn--like a great pool.” “You want to lay hold on the instant,” John said. “You can’t any more than you can lay hold on eternity. They are the two infinities that meet somewhere. Probably from some point of view--if only you could reach it--the instantaneous and the eternal appear as one and the same. But the proofs we have of that are pretty vague: there’s that extraordinary consciousness--coming for no apparent reason--that a given instant is of tremendous importance, that it is going to be remembered, that somehow it’s a source of unknown events to come; then, at the other end of the scale, there’s the recollection of certain instants--more than mere memory, a kind of preservation. An instant years-old by the measure of time, remains intact, perfect; and you know that it’s never going to perish or fade. Usually the occasion was trivial....” “I wish,” said Hugh out of the silence, “the Commander could hear his young gentlemen talking like this.” John laughed uneasily. “I had managed to forget the ship.” “All the same,” Hugh went on, “I like vague talk. I like listening to you--even though I don’t understand too much of it. Vague talk gives me what I imagine you were driving at, what you spoke of before--a sense of eternity.” A watchman’s bell rang faintly in the distant village. When it could be heard no longer, John said: “A sense of eternity--what a phrase that is!” Light, quick footsteps sounded on the path; then the heavier tread of a man. The girl stopped suddenly, touched her companion’s arm, and, when he looked down, laughed breathlessly--an odd laugh, half-confidential, half-embarrassed. “Oh, Torwood,” she exclaimed, “I do so _love_ this East!”