n
them, and work in the garden or play with the Baby. Or he could leave
them for a while and mount his bicycle and ride out into the open
country. For Ransome life still had interests and surprises.

For the Baby surprise and interest lurked in the feeblest of its
sensations; every day brought, for the Baby, excitement, discovery, and
adventure. And then, it had attached itself to Ransome. It behaved as if
it had some secret understanding with its father. Its sense of comedy,
like Ranny's, seemed imperishable. It would respond explosively to
devices so old, so stale, so worn by repetition, that the wonder was
they didn't alienate it, or disgust. The rapid approach and withdrawal
of Ranny's hand, his face suddenly hidden behind its pinafore and
exposed, still more suddenly, with a cry of "Peep-bo!" its own inspired
seizing of Ranny's hair, would move it to delirious laughter or silent
strangling frenzy. And when Ranny wasn't there, and nobody took any
notice of it, it had its own solitary and mysterious ecstasies of mirth.

It was all very well for Ranny and the Baby.

But for Violet it was one interminable, intolerable monotony. Always the
same tiresome things to be done for Granville and for the Baby and for
Ranny, when she did them; and when she didn't there was nothing to do
but to sit still, with no outlook, no interest, no surprise, no
possibility of variety and adventure.

Now and then they would leave the Baby at Wandsworth with its
grandmother, and Ranny would take her to Earl's Court or the Coliseum.
But these bright hours were rare, and when they passed the gloom they
had made visible was gloomier. And brooding over it, she suffered a
sense of irremediable wrong.

Nothing to look forward to but bedtime; the slow, soft-footed ascent to
the room with the walls of love knots and rosebuds, Ranny carrying the
Baby. Nothing to look forward to but the dark when the Baby slept and
Ranny (who _would_ hang over it till the last minute) couldn't see the
Baby any more, the dark when he would turn to her with the old passion
and the old caresses.

And even into the darkness and into their passion there had come a
difference, subtle, estranging, and profound. Between them there
remained that sense of irremediable wrong. In Violet it roused
resentment and in Ransome a tender yet austere responsibility. For he
blamed himself for it.

Violet blamed the Baby.

And in those three months Winny Dymond came and went. By s