He smiles just like you do, all up in the
corners like."

At that the young man's arms tightened, and he gripped Baby with passion
to his breast. He kissed him, looking down at him, passionately,
somberly.

Winny saw, and the impulse seized her to efface herself, to vanish.

"I must be going," she said, "or I shall be late for dinner. Can you
manage, Ranny? There's a beefsteak pie. I made it yesterday."

As she turned Dossie trotted after her; and as she vanished Dossie
cried, inconsolably.

He managed, beautifully, with the beefsteak pie.

His sense of bereavement which still weighed on him was no longer
attached in any way to Violet. He could not say precisely what it _was_
attached to. There it was. Only, when he thought of Violet it seemed to
him incomprehensible, not to say absurd, that he should feel it.

CHAPTER XXV

In the afternoon Winny came again for the children, so that he could go
to Wandsworth unencumbered. The weather was favorable to her idea, which
was not to be in Ranny's house more than she could help, but to be seen,
if seen she must be, out of doors with the children, in a public
innocence, affording the presumption that Violet was still there.

Above all, she was not going to be seen with Ranny, or to be seen by him
too much, if she could help it. With her sense of the sadness of his
errand, the sense (that came to her more acutely with the afternoon) of
things imminent, of things, she knew not what, that would have to be
done, she avoided him as she would have avoided a bereaved person
preoccupied with some lamentable business relating to the departed.

He was aware of her attitude; he was aware, further, that it would be
their attitude at Wandsworth. They would all treat him like that, as if
he were bereaved. They would not lose, nor allow him to lose for an
instant, their awestruck sense of it. That was why he dreaded going
there, why he had put it off till the last possible moment, which was
about three o'clock in the afternoon. His Uncle Randall would be there.
He would have to be told. He might as well tell him while he was about
it. His wife's action had been patent and public; it was not a thing
that could be hushed up, or minimized, or explained away.

As he thought of all this, of what he would have to say, to go into, to
handle, every moment wound him up to a higher and higher pitch of
nervous tension.

His mother opened the door to him. She greeted him with a cer