wedding present, and folded it herself and put it away in the
yellow chest of drawers with the rest of Violet's wedding things. It lay
there, all snowy white, with a violet-scented sachet on the top of it, a
sachet (Winny had found it in the drawer) with a pattern of violets on a
white satin ground and the name "Violet" sprawling all across it in
embroidery.

CHAPTER XIII

Ransome had barely risen from that sleep of exhaustion when he realized
the disastrous character of the night's adventure. He was no longer
uplifted by any sense of sanction and of satisfaction. Of the pride of
life there remained in him only sufficient to prevent him from regarding
his behavior as in any sense a shame and a disaster to his own youth.
Otherwise his mood was entirely penitential. He could not look at the
thing as it affected himself. However it might be for him, he had
wronged Violet, and that was calamity enough for any man to face.
According to all his instincts and traditions, he had wronged her.

Of course, he was going to marry her. He was going to marry her at once;
as soon as ever they could get their banns put up. It never occurred to
him that delay could, in such a case, be possible.

For, from the very moment of that morning after, in Ranny's heart there
was an awful and a sacred fear, a fear of fatherhood. It was the first
thing he thought of as soon as he could think at all.

He wanted to put Violet right at once, before a suspicion of that
possibility should have crossed her mind. It would have seemed to him
abominable to risk it, to wait on, as fellows did, on the off-chance of
a reprieve, till she came to him, poor child, with her whispered tale.
That, to Ranny's mind, was where the shame came in; not in the fact,
but in the compulsion of the fact. It was intolerable that any man
should have the right to say of his own wife that he had been forced to
marry her. Hence his desperate haste.

Violet couldn't understand it. She didn't want to be married all at
once. She said there was no hurry; that he couldn't afford it; that
there was no rime nor reason in it; let them go on as they were a bit;
let them wait and see.

In all this Ranny saw only a tenderness and a desire to spare him. But
he stood firm. He was not concerned with reasons and with rimes; he
wouldn't wait, he wouldn't see; and (this astonished Violet and secretly
enraged her) he absolutely refused to go on as they were.

For his fear was alway