Half child, half woman, Jane hovered strangely between fear and fatalism. She loved Harry, but if there had been any budding of a woman’s love in her it had been nipped by the revelation of his love for Viola and flowed again only in the channels of her childish devotion. There was something of the woman in the way she regarded him in connection with Viola. One man for one woman to love and cherish. He was hers when he had fallen captive to her; others only had that share in him which she might grant to them. Jane had accepted Sidney as a possible mate for Harry, and now she accepted Viola, whom she also loved since she had come to Royd. There was no jealousy in her. Harry loved her as he had always loved her; and Viola loved her. She felt almost as if she had brought them together. But in Jane’s childish view the recognition of this kind of love was the closing of youth’s manuscript. She was uplifted by the idea of having a pair of intimate married friends; but it would be different. She did not ask herself in what way. It might be even more agreeable than having two separate friends, but it would be different. So her view of Harry was a backward one. She talked chiefly of him as he had been, and Lady Brent, somewhat to her comfort, learnt to look upon Harry’s youth also as a chapter in some sense closed, and as a very perfect chapter. Whatever might happen, he had had that. And she had been instrumental in fashioning his youth—a jewel to hang upon the neck of memory, whole and flawless. She would not disturb Jane with her fears, but the child divined them and was often struck by foreboding, which she resisted with all her might. In this also she gave comfort. Her optimism, fitting to her youth and inexperience, was insistent, and would not be denied. Nothing could happen to Harry worse than what had happened already. Nothing—she seemed to frame her creed—could happen to one who was so loved. The gods held the scales—life whole or life disabled on the one side, death on the other. They dipped now this way, now that. What was it that they threw into them? Was there any weight in the strong urgings of those who thought they had learnt from them that they would incline their ears to such utterances? Was there anything that might incline them to spare one to whom they had shown their favours until now? Was he not nearer to them in the tested quality of his manhood than the generality of beings whom they sent to represent their godhead on earth? Had they not fashioned him to shine in years to come as an example of the kind of human stuff they could produce from their workshops? Had they no further use for him in a world so largely populated with their failures? Or were the tokens they threw into the scales nothing at all but just the chances of time and space, so that this man’s righteousness and that man’s worthlessness were of no account against the tick of a watch or the ruled immutable path of a shard of iron?