Neeld thought the question rather brutal; Iver's feelings were not perhaps of the finest. But Harry was apparently unconscious of anything that grated.
"Really, I don't suppose I shall ever go there again," he answered with a laugh. "Off with the old love, you know, Mr Neeld!"
"Oh, don't say that," protested Southend.
There was a hint of some meaning in his speech which made Harry turn to him with quick attention.
"Blent's a mere memory to me," he declared.
The three elder men were silent, but they seemed to receive what he said with scepticism.
"Well, that's the only way, isn't it?" he asked.
"Just at present, I suppose," Southend said to him in a low voice, as he shook hands.
These few words, with the subdued hint they carried, reinforced the strength of the visions. Harry was rather full of his own will and proud of his own powers just now—perhaps with some little excuse. But he
began, thanks to the bearing of these men and to the obstinate thoughts of his own mind, to feel, still dimly, that it was a difficult thing to forget and to get rid of the whole of a life, to make an entirely fresh start, to be quite a different man. Unsuspected chains revealed themselves with each new motion toward liberty. Absolute detachment had been his ideal. He awoke with a start to the fact that he was still, in the main, living with and moving among people who smacked strong of Blent, who had known him as Tristram of Blent, whose lives had crossed his because he was Addie Tristram's son. That was true of even his new acquaintance Lady Evenswood—truer still of Neeld, of Southend, aye, of Sloyd and the Major—most true of his cousin Cecily. This interdependence of its periods is what welds life into a whole; even able and wilful young men have, for good and evil, to reckon with it. Otherwise morality would be in a bad case, and even logic rather at sea. The disadvantage is that the difficulties in the way of heroic or dramatic conduct are materially increased.