“I must go mater,” he said, pulling out his watch; he had carefully avoided her since breakfast though she had laid many traps for him.

“Robin, I want to tell you that I think you splendid.”

“Splendid?  What on earth for?  You were telling me a very different sort of thing a day or two ago.”

“I am sorry now for what I said on Sunday.”

“I don’t think a mother ought ever to say she’s sorry,” said Robin gloomily.

“Not if she is?”

“She oughtn’t to say so.”

“Well dear let us be friends.  Don’t go away angry with me.  I do appreciate you so much for going.  You are my own dear boy.”  And she put her hands on his shoulders.

He took out his watch again.  “I say, I must be off.”

“Don’t suppose a mother doesn’t see and understand.”

“Oh I don’t suppose anything.  Good-bye mater.”

“I think it so splendid of you to go, to turn your back on temptation, to unwind yourself from that wretched girl’s coils.”

“Coils?”

“My Robin”—­she stroked his cheek, the same cheek, as it happened, Priscilla had smitten—­“my Robin must not throw himself away.  I am ambitious where you are concerned, my darling.  It would have broken my heart for you to have married a nobody—­perhaps a worse than nobody.”

Robin, who was staring at her with an indescribable expression on his face, took her hands off his shoulders.  “Look here mater,” he said—­and he was seized by a desire to laugh terrifically—­“there is nothing in the world quite so amusing as the way people will talk wisely of things they don’t in the faintest degree understand.  They seem to feel wise in proportion to their ignorance.  I expect you think that’s a funny speech for me to make.  I can tell you I don’t think it half as funny as yours was.  Good-bye.  I shall miss my train you know if you keep me, and then I’d be exposed again to those—­what was the word? ah, yes—­coils.  Coils!” He burst into loud laughter.  “Good-bye mater.”

She was staring at him blankly.  He hastily brushed her forehead with his moustache and hurried to the door, his face full of strange mirth.  “I say,” he said, putting in his head again, “there’s just one thing I’d like to say.”

She made an eager step towards him.  “Do say it my darling—­say all that is in your heart.”

“Oh it’s not much—­it’s only God help poor Tuss.”  And that was the last of him.  She heard him chuckling all down the passage; but long before his fly had reached Ullerton he had left off doing that and was moulting again.

It rained that day in Somersetshire, a steady, hopeless rain that soaked many a leaf off the trees before its time and made the year look suddenly quite old.  From the windows of Creeper Cottage you could see the water running in rivulets down the hill into the deserted village, and wreaths of mist hanging about the downs beyond.  The dripping tombstone that blocked Priscilla’s window grew danker and blacker as the day went by.  The fires in the cottage burnt badly, for the wood had somehow got wet.  The oilcloth and the wall-papers looked very dismal in the grey daylight.  Rain came in underneath the two front doors and made puddles that nobody wiped away.