With this Harry lit his candle and marched off to bed, very well pleased with himself. He had done all that Lady Augusta had hoped for. So far as his own family were concerned, he had comported himself like a precocious Macchiavelli. He had named no names, he had made no allusions, he had renewed his old friendship as frankly as possible, without however indulging Edgar in a single excursion into the past. He had mentioned Helena, who was perfectly safe and proper to be mentioned, a sign that he talked to his old friend with perfect freedom; but with the judgment of a Solomon he had gone no further. Not in vain did Harry flatter himself on being a man of the world. He was fond of Edgar, but he would have considered his sister’s choice of him, in present circumstances, as too ludicrous to be thought of. And there can be little doubt that Harry’s demeanour had an influence upon Edgar far more satisfactory for Lady Augusta than her sister’s intervention had been. All the visionary possibilities that had revealed themselves in Lady Mary’s warning, disappeared before the blank suavity of Harry. In that friendly matter-of-fact discussion of his friend’s difficulties, he had so entirely left out the chief difficulty, so taken it for granted that nothing of the kind existed, that Edgar felt like a man before whom a blank wall has suddenly risen, where a moment before there were trees and gardens. Harry’s was the man’s point of view, not the woman’s. Those regrets and longings for what might have been, which Lady Mary could not prevent from influencing her, even when she sincerely wished that the might have been should never be, were summarily extinguished in Harry’s treatment. Of course the old must crop up, and confront the new, and of course the complication must be faced and put up with, not run away from. Such was the young man of the world’s philosophy. Edgar sat long after he was gone, once more feeling himself the instrument on which every one played, rather than a conscious actor in the imbroglio. The image got possession of his fanciful brain. Like the thrill of the chords after the hand that struck them had been withdrawn, he seemed to himself to keep on vibrating with long thrills of after sensation, even when the primary excitement was over. But words are helpless to describe the thousand successive changes of feeling of which the mind is capable at a great crisis, especially without immediate power to act one way or another. Edgar, in despair, went and shut himself into the library and read, without knowing well what he read. The passage of those long processions of words before his eyes, gave him a certain occupation, even if they conveyed but little meaning. How easy it would be to do anything; how difficult it was to bear, and go on, and wait!