"Oh! about Harry?" He looked at her sharply for a moment. "You know that I object to lines, Clare. They are dangerous things." He implied that he was above them. "Of course there are times when it is necessary to—well, to be decisive; but at present it seems to me that we must wait for the situation to develop—it will, of course."
"I knew that you would say that," she said impatiently. "But it won't do; the situation has developed. You always preferred to look on—it is, as you say, less dangerous; but here I must have your help. Harry has been back a week; he is, for you and me, unchanged. The situation, as far as we go, is the same as it was twenty years ago. He is not one of us, he never was, and, to do him justice, never pretended to be. We, or at any rate I, imagined that he would be different now, after all that time. He is exactly the same." She paused.
"Well?" he said. "All that for granted, it's true enough. What's the trouble?"
"Things aren't the same though, now. There is father, and Robin. Father has taken to Harry strongly. He told me so just now. And for Robin——"
"Scarcely captivated," said Garrett drily. "Have you seen them together? Hardly domestic——"
Then he looked at her again and laughed. "And that pleases you, Clare."
"Of course," she answered him firmly. "There is no good in hedging. He is no brother of ours, Garrett. He is, what is more important still, no Trojan, and after all family counts for something. We don't like him, Garrett. Why be sentimental about it? He will follow father—and it will be soon—après, le déluge. For ourselves, it does not matter. It is hard, of course, but we have had our time, and there are other things and places. It is about Robin. I cannot bear to think what it would mean if he were alone here with Harry, after all these years."
"He would not stay."
"You think that?" Clare said eagerly. "It is so hard to know. He is still only a boy. Of course Harry shocks him now, shocks everything—his sense of decency, his culture, his pride—but that will wear off; he will get used to it—and then——"
It had been inevitable that the discussion should come, and Garrett had been waiting. He had no intention of going to find her, he would wait until she came to him, but he had been anxious to know her opinion. For himself the possibility of Harry's return had never presented itself. After all those years he would surely remain where he was. In yielding his son he had seemed to abandon all claim to any rights of inheritance, and Garrett had thought of him as one comfortably dead. He had contemplated his own ultimate succession with the pleasurable certainty that it was absolutely the right thing. In his love for a rather superficial tradition he was a perfect Trojan, and might be relied on to continue existing conditions without any attempt at radical changes. Clare, too, would be of great use.