He tried to analyse the source of his disquietude. “Perhaps I’m jealous,” he thought. He was most awfully jealous of anything that other people had to do with his mother, and, anyway, he didn’t know these Willis people very well. They were new friends of hers: a family of wealthy iron-masters whose works had suddenly risen in the year of the Franco-Prussian war, and were now slowly but gigantically expanding. They lived at Mawne Hall, a sad but pretentious mansion of the departed Pomfrets, of which Edwin knew only the wrought-iron gates at the bottom of a steep drive. They had a son, Edward, of very much the same age as himself, but the Willises had no great educational ambitions (that was where Edwin’s mother came in), and had sent him to the ancient but decaying Grammar School of Halesby, an impossible concern in the eyes of any public-schoolboy. The Willises had pots of money. Here again Edwin suspected them. It rather looked as if they had “taken up” his mother; and nobody on earth had the right to do that. He hated the Willises (and particularly Edward) in advance. He always hated people he hadn’t met when he heard too much about them. He thought that the new intimacy probably had something to do with his Aunt Laura, who was diffuse and fussy and ornate, and not a patch on his mother. Nobody was a patch on his mother . . . He couldn’t get rid of his anxiety, and so, in the heat of the moment, before morning school, he answered her letter. “Oh, darling, don’t go to Switzerland with a lot of strangers. If you do go, I feel that I shall never see you again,” he wrote. He knew it wouldn’t be any good. She couldn’t reasonably do anything but smile at his fancies. But he couldn’t help it. He even took the trouble to post the letter in the box at the Grand Entrance, so as to make certain that he couldn’t change his mind. On the way into the classroom he met Griffin, who pushed a packet into his hand. “Here you are,” he said. “Take it.” It was thirty-eight shillings in silver, the first prize in the house sweep on the Birches. He wished he had remembered about it. He would have told his mother in the letter not to bother about the postal order. It was an awful thing to think of her being hard-up and himself rolling in this prodigious and ill-gotten fortune.