s meal he got up and examined himself in his
little square mirror. Then he did so again. Then he walked heavily back
to his table and sat down and buried his face in his hands. When he had
looked the first time he had seen a gray hair. When he had looked the
second time he had discovered that there were many. With a sudden pang
Peter realised that he was getting to be an old man. He took a picture
from a pocket-case and looked at that. Was she getting to be an old
woman?

It was fearful what a difference that little thought suddenly made. A
moment ago he had had the eternities before him. Now there was not an
instant to be wasted. Every minute, every second even, that he sat there
gazing at the faded old picture in his hand was so much lost to him and
to its original. Not God himself could bring it and its possibilities
back to him. Until now he had looked about him upon Youth; he must
henceforth look back to it--back to the things which might have been,
but could never be--and each pulse-beat carried him inevitably farther
from even the retrospective simulacrum of their joys. He and she could
never begin young now. They must take up life cold in the moulds, ready
fashioned. The delight of influencing each other's development was
denied such as they; instead, they must find each other out, must throw
a thousand strands of loving-kindness to span the gap which the patient
years had sundered between them, a gap which should never have widened
at all. Again that remorseless hurry of the moments! Each one of them
made the cast across longer, increased the need for loving-kindness,
demanded anew, for the mere pitiful commonplace task of understanding
each other--which any mother and her child find so trivially easy--the
power of affection which each would have liked to shower on the other
undictated except by the desires of their hearts. Peter called up the
image of himself as he had been when he had left the East, and set it
remorselessly by the side of that present image in the mirror. Then he
looked at the portrait. Could the years have changed her as much? If so,
he would hardly know her!

Those miserable years of waiting! He had not minded them before, but now
they were horrible. In the retrospect the ceaseless drudgery of rock and
pick and drill loomed larger than the truth of it; his patience, at the
time so spontaneous a result of his disposition, seemed that of a man
clinging desperately to a rope, able to hang on