“You’d be relentless if you’d heard the Silts, as I have, talk about ‘a fortune, small perhaps, but unsoiled by trade!’ Of course Aunt Emily is rather different. Oh, goodness me! I’ve forgotten my aunt. She lives not so far. I shall have to call on her.” Accordingly he wrote to Mrs. Failing, and said he should like to pay his respects. He told her about the Ansells, and so worded the letter that she might reasonably have sent an invitation to his friend. She replied that she was looking forward to their _tête-à-tête_. “You mustn’t go round by the trains,” said Mr. Ansell. “It means changing at Salisbury. By the road it’s no great way. Stewart shall drive you over Salisbury Plain, and fetch you too.” “There’s too much snow,” said Ansell. “Then the girls shall take you in their sledge.” “That I will,” said Maud, who was not unwilling to see the inside of Cadover. But Rickie went round by the trains. “We have all missed you,” said Ansell, when he returned. “There is a general feeling that you are no nuisance, and had better stop till the end of the vac.” This he could not do. He was bound for Christmas to the Silts—“as a _real_ guest,” Mrs. Silt had written, underlining the word “real” twice. And after Christmas he must go to the Pembrokes. “These are no reasons. The only real reason for doing a thing is because you want to do it. I think the talk about ‘engagements’ is cant.” “I think perhaps it is,” said Rickie. But he went. Never had the turkey been so athletic, or the plum-pudding tied into its cloth so tightly. Yet he knew that both these symbols of hilarity had cost money, and it went to his heart when Mr. Silt said in a hungry voice, “Have you thought at all of what you want to be? No? Well, why should you? You have no need to be anything.” And at dessert: “I wonder who Cadover goes to? I expect money will follow money. It always does.” It was with a guilty feeling of relief that he left for the Pembrokes’.