, the delirium, the
madness, born of his calamity.

"He'd have been all right if I'd been ass enough to play into his hands
and gone blowin' me nose and grizzlin', and whinin' about my misfortune,
and let _him_ go gassin' about the sadness of it and all that. But
because I kept my end up he went for me.

"Sadness! He doesn't know what sadness is _or_ misfortune.

"My God! If every poor beggar had the luck I've had--to be let off
without having to pay for it!"

Up till then his mother had kept silence. She had let him rave. "Poor
boy," she had said to herself, "he doesn't mean it. It'll do him good."

But when he talked about not having to pay for it, that reminded her
that paying for it was just what he would have to do.

"How'll you manage," she said now, "about the children? I can take them
for a week or two or more while you get settled."

"Would you?"

It _was_ a way out for the present.

"I'd take them altogether--I'd love to, Ranny--if it wasn't for your
Father bein' ill."

In spite of the cataclysm, she still by sheer force of habit kept it up.

"I don't want you to take them altogether," he said.

"I could do it--if you was to come with them--"

That, indeed, was what she wanted, the heavenly possibility she had
sighted from the first. But she had hardly dared to suggest it. Even
now, putting out her tremorous feeler, she shrank back from his refusal.

"If you could let Granville--and come and live with us."

His silence and his embarrassment pierced her to the heart.

"Won't you?" she ventured.

"Well--I've got to think of them. For them, in some ways, the poor old
Humming-bird might, you see, be almost as bad as Virelet."

She knew. She had known it all the time. She had even got so far in
knowledge as to see that Ranny's father was in a measure responsible for
Ranny's marriage. If Ranny had had more life, more freedom, and more
happiness around him in his home, he would not have been driven, as he
was, to Violet.

"Well, dear, you just think it over. If you don't come you must get
somebody."

Yes. He must get somebody. He had thought of that.

"It can't be Winny Dymond, dear."

"No," he assented. "It can't be Winny Dymond."

"And you'll have to come to me until I can find you some one."

They left it so. After all, it made things easier, the method that his
mother had brought to such perfection, her way of skating rapidly over
brittle surfaces, of circumnavigating all profound un