“My dear, don’t cry,” said her brother, drawing up the windows. “I have great hopes of Mr. Tilliard—the Silts have written—Mrs. Failing will do what she can—” As she drove to the cemetery, her bitterness turned against Ansell, who had kept her husband alive in the days after Stephen’s expulsion. If he had not been there, Rickie would have renounced his mother and his brother and all the outer world, troubling no one. The mystic, inherent in him, would have prevailed. So Ansell himself had told her. And Ansell, too, had sheltered the fugitives and given them money, and saved them from the ludicrous checks that so often stop young men. But when she reached the cemetery, and stood beside the tiny grave, all her bitterness, all her hatred were turned against Rickie. “But he’ll come back in the end,” she thought. “A wife has only to wait. What are his friends beside me? They too will marry. I have only to wait. His book, like all that he has done, will fail. His brother is drinking himself away. Poor aimless Rickie! I have only to keep civil. He will come back in the end.” She had moved, and found herself close to the grave of Gerald. The flowers she had planted after his death were dead, and she had not liked to renew them. There lay the athlete, and his dust was as the little child’s whom she had brought into the world with such hope, with such pain. XXXIII That same day Rickie, feeling neither poor nor aimless, left the Ansells’ for a night’s visit to Cadover. His aunt had invited him—why, he could not think, nor could he think why he should refuse the invitation. She could not annoy him now, and he was not vindictive. In the dell near Madingley he had cried, “I hate no one,” in his ignorance. Now, with full knowledge, he hated no one again. The weather was pleasant, the county attractive, and he was ready for a little change. Maud and Stewart saw him off. Stephen, who was down for the holiday, had been left with his chin on the luncheon table. He had wanted to come also. Rickie pointed out that you cannot visit where you have broken the windows. There was an argument—there generally was—and now the young man had turned sulky. “Let him do what he likes,” said Ansell. “He knows more than we do. He knows everything.” “Is he to get drunk?” Rickie asked. “Most certainly.” “And to go where he isn’t asked?” Maud, though liking a little spirit in a man, declared this to be impossible. “Well, I wish you joy!” Rickie called, as the train moved away. “He means mischief this evening. He told me piously that he felt it beating up. Good-bye!” “But we’ll wait for you to pass,” they cried. For the Salisbury train always backed out of the station and then returned, and the Ansell family, including Stewart, took an incredible pleasure in seeing it do this.