"Twelve years on one's back would be pretty long. One would live so fast _inside_ all the while one's body was idle. 'Twould age you. If it had happened when he was fifty, 'twould have been easier, but at eighteen one feels so lively and awake. Anything, _anything_ would seem better than to do just nothing! To wake each morning and know there was nothing before one all the long hours, but to lie still! Other people would get accustomed to it for you--that would be one of the bits which would hurt the most--for you'd never be accustomed yourself. And which would be worst, do you think--the days when it was dull and the room was dark, or the days when the sun blazed, begging him to come out?" Stanor shook himself with an involuntary shiver. "Don't!" he cried sharply. "Don't talk like that! What an imagination you have! I've been enough cut up about it, goodness knows, but I never realised all that it meant. ... Well! He is better now, so we needn't grouse about it any more. It's only that's it's left a mark! He was turned in a moment from a boy into an old man--his youth was killed, _and he can't get it back_! That's one reason why he's so jolly anxious about me. Like most fellows he sets an exaggerated value on the things he has missed himself, and it's a craze with him to--as he calls it--`safeguard my youth.' He is trying to live his own lost days again through me, poor fellow, and it's a poor game. Outsiders take for granted that I'm his heir, but that's bosh. Fellows of thirty-five don't worry about heirs. He has never mentioned the subject; all he _has_ done is to give me every chance in the way of education, and to promise me a good `start off.' I'd have been ready to tackle serious work at once, but he is against a fellow having real responsibility until he's had time to feel his feet. I've had to work, of course--he's keen on that; but he's keen on recreation, too, and freedom from responsibility. He believes, poor chap, that if a fellow has freedom between twenty and thirty, he is better fitted to take up responsi--" Stanor stopped short suddenly, and the blood rushed to his cheeks. "I wonder!" he repeated blankly; "I wonder!" For the first time revelation had come home to him with a flash that his uncle's interference in those two incipient love affairs had not been coincidence, but a deeply matured plan. He recalled occasions when chance words had betrayed a surprising acquaintance with his own doings, the houses at which he visited, and the feminine members of those households. Unsuspecting himself, he had doubtless betrayed more than he knew. In more ways than one his uncle had determined to safeguard his freedom during these early years!