"I'm afraid you've been through a very hard time, Harry."
"Not harder than others, Granny. It's not a bad thing to learn what you have to learn in a hard school. Perhaps you learn it all the quicker."
There was a pause before she said: "It has troubled me a good deal—the thought of your going straight from the life you lived here into the ranks. It wasn't that that we'd tried to prepare you for."
"Oh, the ranks!" he said. "You needn't let that worry you, Granny. I'm glad I went into the ranks. I'd rather do it that way than any."
She showed some surprise at this. "I've thought it over and over," she said. "But I've never thought of it in that way. It was the roughness and coarseness I hated for you. Isn't that what you want to forget?"
He was silent for a time, looking down. Then he burst out: "It's learning what the beastliness of life is that I want to forget. That's what I'd never known. I never minded hard work—doing what others do. And I doubt whether I should have been let down so easily with people like myself—on the outside, I mean. No, I was nearer to the men who had lived simpler lives. I understood them better than I should have done the others. And they were good to me too. I don't think I should have wanted to get a commission if I hadn't felt I ought to. I should have been content to go on till the end of it. But now it's all got to begin again. Oh, don't let's talk of it. I've got a month here, where it's quiet and clean and beautiful. Let's forget what's past and what's coming. I never meant to talk of it. I only wanted to tell you what I was going to do, and to thank you for letting me go my own way."
Poor Lady Brent went to bed that night with something new to think about. She could not sleep, and wrote a long letter to Wilbraham in London. "We might have thought of that," she wrote in the course of it. "It wouldn't have been the little hardships that would trouble him. He had prepared himself for all that, with the life out of doors that he had led here. And he would understand the men he was with, because he was friends with everybody about here. I'm sure they must have loved him too, and all the more because he wasn't like them. The others would have expected him to be like them. I am full of trouble about him. It looks to me now as if we had prepared him for nothing, so as to save him pain. Life has come as a shock to him, and he has not got over it yet. But one thing I'm sure of—he must work it out for himself. I shall meddle with him no more. I am not sure that I have not made a great mistake."
CHAPTER XXIII
CONFIDENCES
Whatever it was that Lady Brent and Lady Avalon had plotted between them, it needed no adjustment of Lady Brent's statement to Wilbraham—that henceforth she should meddle no more in Harry's life—to help or hinder it. They had only to stand aside and perhaps to congratulate one another upon the way their desires were being fulfilled. Only Mrs. Brent went about with a downcast face and air, and but for the kindness Harry showed her might as well have been back in London. She also wrote to Wilbraham, and told him that Harry and Sidney seemed to be falling more and more in love with one another every day.