Bastian allowed himself to be diverted. "I found it out on the last night," he said. "I went out to look for her, and she came in crying, poor child! Something suddenly struck me. She had been out such a lot alone, and she hadn’t done that before when we’d been away together—at least not so much. And she’d been different somehow. I hadn’t thought about it before, but it came to me suddenly all together. And she wouldn’t have been crying like that just because we were going home. There was something—somebody. I dare say I should have got at it by thinking it over; but she told me. I love her, and she loves me, and knows that she can tell me anything. That’s how it was, Wilbraham. You’re not a father, but you can imagine, perhaps, what a father feels about these things, when his daughter is the chief thing in the world to him." "I suppose I can," said Wilbraham. "But all the same you’re not treating her in the way you boast of if you’re not prepared to look upon Harry in the same light. You’ll agree that on the outside of things they’re not equal—those two." "I don’t agree to that," said Bastian, dogmatically. "I said on the outside of things," Wilbraham persisted. "You’ve been where he belongs, and you know what sort of position he’s in. You may have belonged to the same sort of thing once. I don’t know. You’ve never told me who your people were. But you say yourself that you’ve come down in the world, and it’s pretty obvious that you’re not in anything like the position the Brents are now. So you can see how it would have been likely to strike me when I first found it out. But Harry is what he is. I trusted him, just as you trusted Viola. And afterwards I saw Viola. If I can think of her as I do, you ought to be able to think of Harry in the same way, though you haven’t seen him." "Very well, then," said Bastian. "Let’s take it that, leaving out things that don’t matter, they’re to be looked at in the same way. Of course I know, really, that he’s something quite out of the common. I’ve heard the people there talk about him. If I hadn’t thought there was no harm in it—for Viola—I shouldn’t have treated it as I have. But you see, Wilbraham, as a father I’ve got to look a little farther ahead than you do. I suppose to you it’s just a boy and girl falling in love with one another in all their innocence, and if nothing comes of it no harm will be done. Well, it wouldn’t to him. But it’s rather different with her, isn’t it?" Wilbraham was silent. That was exactly as he had looked at it, on Harry’s behalf. And it would be different for Viola.