No creature more desolate than the boy himself at that moment ever stood by a new-filled grave. The love which had enveloped him so closely all his life had passed altogether away. He felt as if there was no longer anyone that cared for him in the world. He felt that this familiar place, which had been his home for so long, was not only to cease to be his home, but to cease altogether. The jar of the chair as it was drawn aside seemed to go through his heart. It was only a commonplace piece of furniture now, a common old chair to be put up at an auction. The place seemed to be desecrated by that simple movement. He had thought he would keep the house just as it was, like a little temple to the memory of the good guardians of his childhood. He was to be their heir, he took that for granted. He would leave everything, he thought, and from time to time come back out of the midst of the active life he had planned for himself, and always find them in imagination sitting there to meet him. No doubt John would soon have found out the impossibility of that fond imagination; but this was what he thought. He had even planned how he should put the gardener and his wife--themselves old people for whom it would make a provision--into the house to keep it for him, which he had said to himself, with tender childish pleasure, would please grandmamma. But with the jar of that chair as it was drawn aside, John’s tender imaginations went from him, leaving him with a sense of astonishment and startled waking up. He had another will to calculate with of which he had not thought. She kept looking at him while these thoughts passed in a tumult through his mind, waiting for an answer. It was but for a very short time, yet to both of them it seemed long: and with all her seriousness she was of a disposition which could not brook waiting. She said, ‘Well!’ a little sharply, when he made no reply. ‘I did not say anything,’ John replied. ‘No, you did not say anything--you made no response. You look at me as if you wanted to make a quarrel over those graves. But you shall not make any quarrel, on that point I am resolved. We must understand each other.’ He went and leant upon the mantelpiece and stood looking down into the fire. Make a quarrel! It seemed to John that his heart would burst with the pang this misconception gave him. A quarrel, over their graves! But, though the suggestion was so abhorrent, he felt the sense of rebellion and resistance grow stronger and stronger. He would not even meet her eye. He would withdraw into that passive unyielding silence which of all things in the world is most difficult to meet and to withstand. She turned again towards him though she could not see his face. ‘John,’ she said, ‘don’t make me feel, at a moment when I am far from wishing to feel it, how you have been spoiled by my father and mother--and how wrong I was in giving you out of my own care.’