Drusilla repeated these words to her father and mother at table when she went home to luncheon.  “If she feels like that now,” she commented, “what will she say when she knows all?—­if she ever has to know it.”

“But she hasn’t changed,” Mrs. Temple argued.

“It doesn’t make any difference in her.”

Drusilla shook her head.  “Yes, it does, mother dear.  You don’t know anything about it.”

“I know enough about it,” Mrs. Temple declared, with some asperity, “to see that she will be the same Olivia Guion after her father has gone to prison as she was in the days of her happiness.  If there’s any change, it will be to make her a better and nobler character.  She’s just the type to be—­to be perfected through suffering.”

“Y-y-es,” Drusilla admitted, her head inclined to one side.  “That might be quite true in one way; but it wouldn’t help Rupert Ashley to keep his place in the Sussex Rangers.”

“Do you mean to say they’d make him give it up?”

“They wouldn’t make him, mother dear.  He’d only have to.”

“Well, I never did!  If that’s the British army—­”

“The British army is a very complicated institution.  It fills a lot of different functions, and it’s a lot of different things.  It’s one thing from the point of view of the regiment, and another from that of the War Office.  It’s one thing on the official side, and another on the military, and another on the social.  You can’t decide anything about it in an abstract, offhand way.  Rupert Ashley might be a capital officer, and every one might say he’d done the honorable thing in standing by Olivia; and yet he’d find it impossible to go on as colonel of the Rangers when his father-in-law was in penal servitude.  There it is in a nutshell.  You can’t argue about it, because that’s the way it is.”

Rodney Temple said nothing; but he probably had these words in his mind when he, too, early in the afternoon, made his way to Tory Hill.  Olivia spoke to him of her father’s losses, though her allusions to Colonel Ashley were necessarily more veiled than they had been with Mrs. Fane.

“The future may be quite different from what I expected.  I can’t tell yet for sure.  I must see how things—­work out.”

“That’s a very good way, my dear,” the old man commended.  “It’s a large part of knowledge to know how to leave well enough alone.  Nine times out of ten life works out better by itself than we can make it.”

“I know I’ve got to feel my way,” she said, meaning to agree with him.

“I don’t see why.”

She raised her eyebrows in some surprise.  “You don’t see—?”

“No, I don’t.  Why should you feel your way?  You’re not blind.”

“I feel my way because I don’t see it.”

“Oh yes, you do—­all you need to see.”

“But I don’t see any.  I assure you it’s all confusion.”

“Not a bit, my dear.  It’s as plain as a pikestaff—­for the next step.”