"We have been very anxious about him at home," he said. "We are anxious still—not to get him to come back, but that he should not cut himself off from us. I've come up to London on purpose to get a message to him if I can. I didn't tell Lady Brent I should come here, or say anything about you. She thinks I have only come to see Mr. Gulliver, the family solicitor, and ask him to find out, if he can, where Harry is. His mother can hardly bear the thought of not hearing from him for months, and not knowing where he is. Lady Brent was not altogether unprepared for his enlisting. She couldn't have been a party to it, as he's not even of an age to enlist yet, and I suppose he's had to represent himself as older than he is in order to get taken. But she told me herself that she was proud of him for doing it, and she certainly wouldn't do anything to interfere with him, now he's taken the matter into his own hands. If he knew that——"
He did not finish his sentence, which was on the note of appeal to her. Nor did he look at her.
There was a pause. Then she said, "I haven't seen Harry, you know, Mr. Wilbraham."
He looked at her then, and saw that there were tears in her eyes. So his appeal had not been without its effect.
"I think his mother ought to know," she said, "and that he ought to write to her."
In a flash of understanding, he saw that he had got all that he had come for, and that he would get no more. Or at least that he must not exercise pressure to get more, or put her in the position of refusing to give it. She would tell Harry what he had told her, and she would tell him that she thought he ought to write to his mother. Of Lady Brent she had said nothing. It was probable that Lady Brent appeared in her eyes in a different light from that in which Wilbraham saw her.
As for everything else—it was their secret, to be treated by him with respect. He would probe into it no further; and indeed it was better that he should not know more than he knew already of how it was between them. There was quite enough on his mind that he had kept from Lady Brent.
"Yes, I think he should write," he said. "I shall see Mr. Gulliver to-morrow."
The two statements had no apparent bearing upon one another, but Viola seemed to accept them with relief, and was beginning to talk to him pleasantly, but with no reference to Harry, when Bastian came in.
He was nearly half an hour earlier than his usual time, it appeared, and Wilbraham was inclined to be disappointed at having his talk with Viola cut short. Whenever he was with her he felt himself almost violently in sympathy with Harry in his love for her. He was observing her all the time, and there was nothing that she said or did that did not deepen his first impression of her. He wanted to feel like that about her, for Harry's sake; championship of her as one who was in all essentials fit to mate with him, might stand Harry in good stead later on.