He lured her in. She came over the threshold as if on some delicious yet perilous adventure, with eyes that shone and with two little teeth that bit down her lower lip; a way she had when she attempted anything difficult and at the same time exciting. He showed her everything except the room she had seen already, the room with the love knots and the rosebuds where Violet and the Baby were. Winny admired everything with joy and yet with reverence, from the splendid overmantel in the front sitting-room to the hot-water tap in the bathroom.

"My word," Winny said, "what I'd give to have a bath like that!"

"I say," said Ransome, suddenly moved, "you take a lot more interest in it all than Virelet does."

"She's used to it," said Winny. "Besides, I always take an interest in other people's houses."

She pondered. They were both leaning out of the back bedroom window now, looking down into the garden.

"Think of all those little empty houses, Ranny, and the people that'll come and live in them. It seems somehow so beautiful their coming and finding them and getting things for them; and at the same time it seems somehow sad." She paused.

"I don't mean that _you're_ sad, Ranny. You know what I mean."

He did. He had felt it too, the beauty and the sadness, but he couldn't have put it into words. It was the sadness and the beauty of life.

It was queer, he thought, how Winny felt as he did about most things in life.

But Winny's joy over the house was nothing to her joy over the garden, the garden that Ranny had made, and over the little tree that he had planted. It was the most beautiful and wonderful tree in the whole world. For in her eyes everything that Ranny did and that he made was beautiful and wonderful. It could not be otherwise: because she loved him.

And oh! she had the most intense appreciation of Granville, of the name and of the personality. She took it all in. Trust Winny.

And as they stood in the gateway at parting, he told her of the system by which in twenty, no, in not much more than nineteen years' time Granville would be his own.

"Why, Ranny, it sounds almost too good to be true!"

"I know it does. That's why sometimes I think I'll be had over it yet. I say to myself Granville looks jolly innocent, but he'll score off me, you bet, before he's done."

"He _does_ look innocent," said Winny.

He did. (And how Winny took it in!)

"_That's_ what tickles me," said Ranny. "Sometimes, when I come home of a evening and find him still sittin' there, c.o.c.kin' his little eyes as if he was goin' to have a game with me, it comes over me that he's up to something, and--what do you think I do?"

"I don't know, Ranny." She almost whispered it.

"I burst out laughin' in his face."

"How _can_ you?" She was treating Granville as he did, exactly as if it was alive.

"Well--you see how comical he is."

"Yes. I see it." (Of course she saw it.) "Still--there's something about him all the same."

There was something about everything that was Ranny's, something that touched her, something that made her love it, because she loved him.

Winny couldn't have burst out laughing in its face.

"I'm glad I came," she said. "Because now I can see you."

He misunderstood. "I hope you will, Winky--very often."

"I mean--see you when you're not there."

He looked away. Something in her voice moved him unspeakably. For one moment he saw into the heart of her--placid, profound, and pure.

He was going down the Avenue with her now. For in that moment he had felt the beauty of her and the sadness. He couldn't bear to think of her "seeing herself home," going back alone to that little room in St. Ann's Terrace, where some day, when Maudie married, she would be left alone.

The least he could do was to walk with her a little way.

"I say, Win," he said, presently, "why ever haven't you come before?" He really wondered.

There was a long silence. Then, "I don't know, Ranny," she said, simply.

They had come to the end of Acacia Avenue before either of them spoke again. Then Ranny conceived something brilliant.

"What did you think of the Baby?" he said.

She fairly shone at him, and at the same time she was earnest and very grave.

"Oh, Ranny," she said, "it's the most beautiful baby that ever was--Isn't it?"

Ranny smiled superbly.

"They tell me so; but I dunno. _Is_ it?"

"Of course it is."

She had turned, parting from him at last, and she flung that at him as she walked backward, smiling in his face.

"Well--I must be going back to Vi," he said.

And he went back.

CHAPTER XVII

In April Ransome looked confidently for Violet to "settle down." Mrs.

Usher had a.s.sured him again and again that the next month would bring the blessed change.

"She'll be all right," said Mrs. Usher, "when the nurse goes and she has you and Baby to herself."

And at first it seemed as though Violet's mother knew what she was talking about.

April put an end to their separation. April, like a second honeymoon, made them again bride and bridegroom to each other. Nature, whom Ranny had blasphemed and upbraided, triumphed and was justified in Violet's beauty, that bloomed again and yet was changed to something almost fine, almost clear; as if its coa.r.s.e strain had been purged from it by maternity. Something fine and clear in Ranny responded to the change.

And, as in their first honeymoon, Violet's irritation ceased. She was sullen-sweet, with a kind of brooding magic in her ways. She drew him with eyes whose glamour was tenderness under lowering brows; she bound him with arms that, for all their incredible softness, had a vehemence that held him as if it would never let him go; and in the cleaving of her mouth to his there was a savage will that pressed as if it would have crushed between them all memory and premonition. This was somewhat disastrous to fineness and clearness, and Ransome's no doubt would have perished but for the persistence with which he held Violet sacred as the mother of his child.

Her att.i.tude to the child was still incomprehensible to him, but he was beginning to accept it, perceiving that it had some obscure foundation in her temperament. There were moments when he fell back on his old superst.i.tion (exploded by the doctor) and told himself that Violet was one of those who suffer profoundly from the shock of childbirth. And in that case she would get over it in time.