After a time his irritation died away. It could not be so distressing to Harry to be cut off from Royd as it was to them to be cut off from him, but his letters showed that he felt it, and especially the few letters that he wrote to little Jane, in which he seemed to be reaching out after the untroubled innocent happiness of his youth, and the beauty and freedom that had lain all about it. It was the old Harry that appeared in those letters, and here and there in others; the new Harry became more and more evident otherwise—a man doing a man’s hard work in hard and uncongenial surroundings, much older than his years, where in some ways he had been so much younger. He was hard on himself as well as hard upon them. They had given him happiness in his sheltered youth, but the plunge he had taken into a life different from any that could have been anticipated for him can have been none the easier on that account. The ugliness and crudity that other boys might in some measure have been prepared for would bear very hardly upon him, and he would have to fight through it alone. Wilbraham came to see that he might shrink from mixing it up with his home life. Perhaps he was afraid that he might weaken in it if he was subject to any pressure. It would surely have been open to him to have had at least a few days at home before he went abroad; but he had not taken the opportunity. Had he blamed them for bringing him up in that seclusion? There was nothing in his letters to show it. But it must have been very soon revealed to him how exceptional his life had been, and how much he had missed of what other boys had had. He would not always be capable of gauging the value of what he had missed, when face to face with some situation with which his inexperience had unfitted him to cope lightly. It might take him a long time to acknowledge that what he had gained had been more than what he had missed, and partly arose from it. He would know, too, before long that the immovable seclusion in which his grandmother and mother and Wilbraham himself lived was anything but the normal state of affairs that it had been implicitly represented to him. He would ask himself why they had never left Royd from one year’s end to another, and why so few people had ever come there; and he would see that it had all been with reference to him. He would hardly be able to understand it. If he acknowledged the freedom he had enjoyed, the limits of it would still strike him, with his new knowledge of the world’s ways. If he had not, since his childhood, been dominated by women, he had certainly been managed, without knowing it. Whether, in the strangeness and disagreeableness and difficulty of much of his new life he was inclined to resent this unduly, or whether he saw behind it enough to admit that there had been wisdom as well as apparent eccentricity, and certainly love, in the steps his youth had been made