could perfectly well afford to let him go. There
was no reason why they should want him back again, to show him--

All this Ranny felt obscurely. And the more he thought about it the more
it seemed to him horrible that anybody should have lived as his father
had lived and die as he had died, without anybody having really loved
him. It was horrible that he, Ranny, should not have loved him. For that
was what it came to; that was what he knew about himself; that and
nothing else was at the bottom of his grief, and it was what made it so
different from theirs. It was as if he realized for the first time in
his life what pity was. He had never known what a terrible, what an
intolerable thing was this feeling that was so like love, that should
have been love and yet was not. For he didn't deceive himself about it
as his mother (mercifully for her) was deceiving herself at this moment.
This intolerable and terrible feeling was not love. In love there would
have been some happiness.

Walking slowly, thinking these things, or rather feeling them, vaguely
and incoherently, he had come to the grove by the public footpath. It
was there that he had sat with his mother more than six years ago, when
she had as good as confessed to him that she had not loved her husband;
not, that was to say, as she had loved her child.

And it was there, only the other night, that he had sat with Winny. One
time seemed as long ago as the other.

And it was there that Winny was sitting now, on their seat, alone,
facing the way he came, as if positively she had known that he would
come.

He realized then that it was Winny that he wanted, and that the grief he
found so terrible and intolerable was driving him to her, though when he
started he had not meant to go to her, he had not known that he would
go.

She rose when she saw him and came forward.

"Ranny! Were you coming to me?"

"Yes." (He knew it now.) "Let's stay here a bit. I've left Uncle and
Aunt with Mother."

"How is she?"

"Oh--well, it's pretty awful for her."

"It must be."

He was sitting near her but a little apart, staring at the lamplit road.
She felt him utterly removed from her. Yet he was there. He had come to
her.

"I don't think," he said, presently, "Mother'll ever be happy again. _I_
sha'n't, either."

She put her hand on his hand that lay palm downward between them on the
seat and that was stretched toward her, not as if it sought her
consciously, but in utte