known the ultimate secret of this woman who ate at his
board and slept in his bed and had borne his child. It was with his
eternal innocence that he put it to her, What were they to do now?

And that implacable and inscrutable soul in her was ready for him. It
prompted her to say that she couldn't do more than she did, and that if
things were to be different he must get some one else to see to them. He
must keep a servant. He should have kept one for her long ago.

Poor Ranny protested that he'd keep twenty servants for her if he could
afford it. As it was, a charwoman every week was more than he could
manage, and she knew it. And she said, looking at him very straight,
that there was one way they could do it. They could do as other people
did. In half the houses in the Avenue they let apartments. They must
take a lodger.

Violet had thrown out this suggestion more than once lately. And he had
put his foot down. Neither he nor Granville, he said, could stand a
lodger. A lodger would make Granville too hot by far to hold him.

Now in their stress he owned that there was something in it. He would
think it over.

Thinking it over, he saw more than ever how impossible it was. The
charwoman, advancing more and more, had been a fearful strain on his
resources, and the expenses of the Baby's birth had brought them to the
breaking-point. And then there had been Baby's illnesses. Before that
there was the perambulator.

But that was worth it. He remembered how last year he had seen an
enormous poster in High Street, with the words in scarlet letters: "Are
you With or Without a Pram for Baby?" He had realized then for the first
time that he was without one. And the scarlet letters had burnt
themselves into his brain, until, for the very anguish of it, he had
gone and bought a pram and wheeled it home under cover of the darkness,
disguised in its brown-paper wrappings to heighten the surprise of it.
Violet had not been half so pleased nor yet surprised as he had
expected; but he had got his money back again and again on that pram
with the fun he'd had out of it.

But before that again, in their first year, things had had to be done
for the house and garden. Ranny shuddered now when he thought of what
the lawn-mower alone had cost him. And that tree! And then the little
pleasures and the outings--when he totted them all up he found that he
had taken Violet to Earl's Court and the Coliseum far, far oftener than
he could hav