"I am glad you think of it like that," said Lady Brent. "But I have been troubled by something he said to me when he first came home. His upbringing has made him what he is, but there are many things it didn’t prepare him for. I think he was dreading going out again, as an officer. He doesn’t know other young men of his class. He is so different from them, and they want everybody to be alike. With the men of simpler lives that he has lived with and fought with he would have made his way more easily." "Yes," said Viola. "I was very sad at first to think of him thrown into that rough hard life, but I needn’t have been. And I think now he is happier about the other." She looked at Wilbraham, who said: "We’ve had it out, we three together. It’s not as serious as you have been thinking. You must remember that he hasn’t been with young men of his own sort at all; and in the ranks of course he’d look at them from another angle altogether; and perhaps he wouldn’t like everything he saw about them—his officers, I mean. That’s all it is, really—a diffidence about how he’s going to fit in with them. But of course he’ll make his way, with the other subalterns and people, just as he did with the men. There’s so much character in him, as well as everything that young men do value in each other. I think we persuaded him that he’d be a good deal better off than he has been, didn’t we, Viola?" "Oh, he didn’t want very much persuasion. He said he had been worrying himself about things that didn’t really matter. But he was so much happier about everything when he came back from Royd. I don’t think even I could have done that—not alone. It would just have been we two, keeping out of the world together. And poor Harry is in the world now." "Yes," said Wilbraham, "and well fitted to cope with it. Of course it came as a shock to him at first. It would have done that anyhow, and he would have had to square his accounts with it by himself, before he could have felt himself at his ease. We couldn’t have helped him. If you’re still troubling yourself about having made mistakes, dear lady, I don’t think you need. You made very few. You forged the good steel in him, but it had to be tempered." This view of it comforted her. "We shall all be very happy now," she said. When they had talked a little longer, Bastian came in. Lady Brent rose from the sofa, and they stood looking at one another for an instant before Bastian shook hands with her, with a laugh. "I wasn’t prepared for this," he said. "Have you known who I was?" "No," she said. "Your people thought you were on the other side of the world." "I meant them to," he said. "I’d no use for my people, after the way they behaved to me. I took rather an absurd name, which was the last they would recognize me under if they ever came across it, which seemed unlikely."