n and out
with Ranny in his house.

She stooped for a final, reassuring look at Baby.

"Can you manage with him?" she whispered.

He nodded.

"I've made him his food in that saucepan. You'll have to heat it on the
gas ring--in there."

"In there" was Violet's room.

They went downstairs together.

"I wish I could see you home," he said again.

"I'm all right." But she paused on the doorstep. "You ought to have
somebody. You can't be left all alone like this. Mayn't I run down and
fetch your mother?"

"No," he said, "you mayn't. I'll go down myself to-morrow morning, if
you wouldn't mind coming in and looking after the kids for a bit."

"Of course I'll come. Good night, Ranny."

"Good night, Winky. And thanks--" His throat closed with a sharp
contraction on the words. She slipped into the darkness and was gone.

* * * * *

He was thankful that he had had the sense to see the impossibility of
it, of her spending the night in his house with nobody in it but the two
of them and the two children.

But it was only when, in the act of undressing, he was reminded of
Violet's letter by its bulging in his breast pocket, that he glimpsed
the danger they had escaped. Up till then he had only thought of Winny,
of her reputation, of her post at Johnson's (imperiled if she were not
in by eleven), of all that she would not and could not think of in her
thought for him. Now, that inner sanity, that secret wisdom which had
made him preserve Violet's letter as a possibly valuable document,
suggested that if Winny had stayed all night in the house with him that
document would have lost its value. Not that he had meant to do anything
with it, that he had any plan, or any certain knowledge. Those two
ideas, or rather, those two instinctive appreciations, of the value of
the document, and of the awfulness of the risk they ran, were connected
in his mind obscurely as the stuff of some tale that he had been told,
or as something he had seen sometime in the papers. He put them from him
as things that he himself had no immediate use for; while all the time
subconscious sanity guarded them and did not let them go.

But that was all it did for him. It did not lift from him his
oppression, or fill with intelligible detail his blank sense of
calamity, of inconsolable bereavement. This oppression, this morbid
sense, amounted almost to hallucination; it prevented him from thinking
as clearly as he migh