pleasantness, and
of plunging, when she did plunge, only into the vague, the void.

And through it all he was aware of the brittleness, the unpleasantness,
the profundity of what was immediately before him, how to deal with poor
Winny and her innocent enormity; the impropriety, as it had been
presented to him, of her devotion.

But even this problem, so torturing to his nerves, was presently lost
sight of in the simple, practical difficulty of detaching Winny from the
children; or rather, of detaching the children from Winny, of tearing,
as they had to tear, them from her, piecemeal, first Baby, then Dossie,
with every circumstance of barbarous cruelty.

It was a spectacle, an operation of such naked agony that before it the
most persistent, the most incorruptible sense of propriety broke down.
It was too much altogether for Mrs. Ransome.

Dossie was the worst. She had strength in her little fingers, and she
clung.

And the crying, the crying of the two, terrible to Ranny, terrible to
Winny, the passionate screams, the strangled sobs, the long,
irremediable wailing, the terrifying convulsive silences, the awful
intermissions and shattering recoveries of anguish--it was as if their
innocence had insight, had premonition of the monstrous, imminent
separation, of the wrong that he and she were about to do to each other
in the name of such sanctities as innocence knows nothing of. For
outrage and wrong it was to the holy primal instincts, drawing them, as
it had drawn them long ago, seeking to bind them again, body and soul,
breaking all other bonds; insult and violence to honest love, to
fatherhood and motherhood, to the one (one and threefold) perfection
that they could stand for, he and she.

It ended by its sheer terror in Winny's staying just for that evening,
to put the little things to sleep. For nobody else, not Ranny, and not
his mother, was able to do that. The dark design of their torturers was
to take these innocent ones by night, drugged with their sleep, and pack
them in the pram, snugly blanketed, and thus convey them in secrecy to
Wandsworth, where, it was hoped, they would wake up, poor lambs, to a
morning without memory.

"Well--Winky," he said. But it was not yet well. He had to stand by and
see Winky stoop over Baby's cot (it was her right) for the last look.

She knew it was her last look, in that room--in that way that had been
the way of innocence.

"Well, I never!" said Ranny's mother, as