“It was all on the table,” John answered quickly. “I hadn’t time to put it away when you sent for me. I’m sorry it made a litter. If I may go down for a moment, I’ll get Fane-Herbert to put it into my locker for me--I should be back almost at once. Then everything will be tidy----” He stopped helplessly. “I wasn’t objecting to the untidiness,” Hartington said. The silence seemed unending. John had never felt so uncomfortable, so utterly at a loss. He knew the contemptuous thoughts that must be passing through Hartington’s mind. He tried haltingly to minimize his error. “I do it only--only in my spare time,” he said, “just as other people do--do other things.” He wanted to explain that he meant no harm by his poetry, but he could find no words. The poetry itself was the harm, he knew. There was no explaining it away. “Do you mind very much?” he asked nervously. Hartington smiled. “Mind?” he said. And then he added, “Why should I mind? Is it contrary to the King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions to write verse?” “No, but----” “The point is, that most Subs would have made you read it to the Mess after dinner, and very probably beaten you at the end of it--if not on that pretext, then on some other. So it wasn’t very discreet of you to leave it about, do you think?” “No.” “And there must be a penalty,” said Hartington, taking John by the arm. “I suppose I must be a very bad Sub in some respects--at any rate, not in accordance with pattern: you’ll find that out, I expect. But there must be a penalty. So after dinner, when we have turned over to the Officer of the Night, you will report yourself in my cabin with the manuscript you are going to read to me, and two whiskies-and-sodas.... Do you mind reading to me?” “Of course not,” said John, amazed. “I should like to.” “And I want to hear more of it. So that’s settled.” II That evening John went to Hartington’s cabin for the first of many times; but the first, because it was so unexpected and so full of promise for the future, was perhaps the most marvellous evening of all. It did not end until long after the Gunroom had been closed and the other midshipmen were turned in. By then the ship had become very silent and peaceful. As he climbed into his hammock, after a glance at the curtain behind which Hartington’s cabin-light was still shining, John’s thoughts returned to the _King Arthur_, and to the nights when he had turned in bruised, bleeding, and covered with the filth of the Gunroom deck. He remembered the hopelessness of his outlook then, the sense he had had of confinement worse than physical confinement, of being surrounded and shut in by a wall which he could never, never break. And now--he thrust his face deep into his pillow--now he had found at last one living soul in and of the profession to which he was bound, in whose eyes the things he cared for were not all dust and ashes.