To youth, consciousness of the passage of time comes seldom, but coming, it brings with it pain by which age is not affected--pain unsoftened by any acceptance of the inevitable. Still the chance; still the opportunity to make good; still the feverish casting about for means! And middle-age growing nearer--a vision of the insignificant man going to and fro between his home and office, of the two-and-a-half stripe lieutenant many, many times passed over! John saw that he had been wasting his life. Then he saw, in a flash that left him blind, that, unless its whole course were changed, he would continue to waste his life. Waste--and at the end old age, looking back upon years empty of achievement. “If only I had my time again! If I were but eighteen once more!” It was as if this foreseen wish had been uttered and fulfilled. He was eighteen now. The future was still his. The letter fell with his hand on to his knees. “Finished?” Hugh asked. John looked up to encounter his laughing eyes. “I have been watching your face,” he went on. “It seems to have been a disturbing letter.” “It was,” John answered. “It reminds me how far we are out of the world and how infernally slack I have been.” He held out the envelope that the writing might be seen. “Margaret!” Hugh exclaimed. “What has she been saying?” “She has made me think, thrown me back on things I had forgotten. It was so good to be free of the _King Arthur_ that, during the whole passage out, the world has seemed the best of all possible worlds. It isn’t--or it won’t be long. Oh, Hugh, it’s all very well--a happy ship, a good Wardroom, a good Sub, and no Gunroom persecution; but what does it all lead to? I want to do other things--things I shall never be able to do--and to meet other people.” Hugh, believing that John was thinking particularly of Margaret, said: “At any rate, some of the ‘other people’ will be out East before long.” “You dear old fool!” John exclaimed. “That isn’t what I meant.... No; it’s just restlessness, I suppose. I feel that all the work we do is so like a housemaid’s--to-day’s routine the same as to-morrow’s. We never build or make anything. For all our work we leave nothing behind.” “I don’t see your trouble,” Hugh said. “So long as life is pleasant I don’t want to leave anything behind.” “We are missing so much. We get out of touch. In whatever progress there is we have no part.” “I know we are missing a great deal. Every letter I get from outside makes me jealous of the people at home. They can go about and see things, and we are shut up day in and day out.”