In the long sad conversations they had about him at Royd during the early months, they arrived at some sort of conclusions, helped by an occasional expression in his letters. He had gone out of his own world, and as long as his time of probation lasted he would keep out of it. He was not likely to think himself degraded by serving in the ranks, but they came to understand that he was keeping his actual condition hidden. There was nothing in his letters, which would be read by his superior officers, to indicate it, and before he left England they were more about Royd than about himself. There was never very much about himself. Every time he wrote he said he was well and happy; but it peeped through that the change in his life was not without its effect upon him. How could it be otherwise, brought up as he had been? He was learning in a hard school; but he was learning, and flashes of his old boyish brightness broke through the reticence which he seemed to have imposed upon himself. They came to look upon it as a time of probation for him, and to believe that so he looked upon it himself. Sometimes they thought they saw signs of expectation. He was working for and looking forward to something. Viola, said Wilbraham to himself. His commission to be won in the field, said Lady Brent. He wanted no help towards it, as might have been given by finding him out, which should not have been difficult after he had left England, and pulling strings. When he had gained his commission, by his own unaided effort, and by no reliance upon his place in the world outside the army, then he would come back to them. It was hard on Lady Brent to wait, and to lift no finger, and harder still on his mother. But he must be trusted. They had directed him through his childhood, and youth, and now he would brook no direction. The only consolation they had was that his upbringing had not taken from him a man’s initiative and determination. The experiment seemed to have been justified; but with a greater knowledge of the world beforehand he might not have thought it necessary so to cut his life in two. They were paying a heavy price. Wilbraham, who had more of a clue to Harry’s actions than the others, was not without irritation against what at times he set down as mere hard undutifulness. He had great sympathy with Lady Brent, who had so wonderfully sunk her own feelings in acquiescing in the boy’s unreasonable determination. She could almost certainly have traced him had she wished to do so. And Wilbraham, at least, knew that he must have been told at the very beginning that he would not be interfered with. Why could he not then have softened the hardship to those who loved him? Granted that the new love that had come into his life was so much more to him than the old; but it was not like him to throw over the old altogether, and indeed his letters showed that he had not done so.