xorable. He refused, flatly, to lend his money
for a purpose that he persisted in regarding as iniquitous. Even if he
had not advanced a further sum to young Randall's father, he was not
going to help young Randall through the Divorce Court, stirring all that
mud again. Not he.

"You should wash your dirty linen at home," he said.

"You mean keep it there and never wash it. That's what it comes to,"
said young Randall, furiously.

"It's been kept. And everybody's forgotten that it's there by this time.
Why rake it up again?" said his Uncle Randall.

And there was no making him see why. There was no making any of them
see. Mrs. Ransome wouldn't hear of the divorce. "It'll kill your Father,
Ranny," she said, and stuck to it.

And Ranny set his mouth hard and said nothing. He calculated that if he
put by twelve shillings a week for twenty-five weeks that would be
fifteen pounds. He could borrow the other fifteen in Shaftesbury Avenue
as he had done before, and in six months he would be filing his
petition.

As soon as he was ready to file it he would tell Winny he cared for her.
He would ask her to be his wife.

He had not told any of them about Winny. But they knew. They knew and
yet they had no pity on him, nor yet on her. When he thought of it Ranny
set his face harder.

* * * * *

Yet Winny came and went, untroubled and apparently unconscious. She was
not only allowed to come and go at Wandsworth as she had come and gone
at Granville, by right of her enduring competence; she was desired and
implored to come. For if she had (and Mrs. Ransome owned it) a "way"
with the children, she had also a way with Mrs. Ransome, and with Mr.
Ransome. The Humming-bird, growing weedier and weaker, revived in her
presence; he relaxed a little of his moroseness and austerity. "I don't
know how it is," said Ranny's mother, "but your Father takes to her. He
likes to see her about."

Saturday afternoons, and Sundays, and late evenings in summer were her
times, so that of necessity she and Ranny met.

Not that they pleaded necessity for meeting. Since his awful
enlightenment and maturity, Ransome had never thought of pleading
anything; for he did not hold himself accountable to anybody or require
anybody to tell him what was decent and what wasn't. And Winny was like
him. He couldn't imagine Winny driven to plead. She had gone her own way
without troubling her head about what people thought of her