on't know anything at all."

"I know I love you and you me, and that's enough."

"Oh--_is_ it?"

"It's the great thing."

"Winny, d'you know, that if poor Father hadn't died when he did--we
missed it by a day. To think it could happen like that!"

He clinched it with, "This Combined Maze has been a bit too much for you
and me."

CHAPTER XXX

Mrs. Ransome for the first time in her life was thinking. She called it
thinking, although that was no word for it, for its richness, its
amplitude, its peculiar secret certainty. You might say that for the
first time in her life Mrs. Ransome was fully conscious; that, with an
extraordinary vividness and clarity she saw things, not as she believed
and desired them to be, but as they were.

She saw, for the first time since Mr. Ransome's death, that she was
happy; or rather, that she had been happy for more than two years, that
is to say, ever since Mr. Ransome's death. And this vision of her
happiness, of her iniquitous and disgraceful satisfaction, was shocking
to Mrs. Ransome. She would have preferred to think that ever since Mr.
Ransome's death she had been heartbroken.

But it was not so. Never in all her life had she been so at peace; never
since her girlhood had she been so gay. This state of hers had lasted
exactly two years and four months, thus clearly dating from her
bereavement. For it was in May of nineteen-ten that he had died, and she
was now in September nineteen-twelve.

She might not have been aware of it but that it, her happiness, had only
six months more to run.

For two years and four months she had had her son Ranny to herself. She
had been the mistress of his house, the little house that she loved,
and the mother of his children whom (next to her son Ranny) she adored.
For two years and four months she had made him comfortable with a
comfort he had never dreamed of, which most certainly he had never
known. With tenderness and care and vigilance unabridged and unremitted,
she had brought Granville and Stanley and Dossie to perfection. It had
not been so hard. Stanley and Dossie she had found almost perfect from
the first, more perfect than Ranny she had found them, because they were
not so near to her own flesh, and not loved so passionately as he.

And Granville, once far from perfect, had responded to treatment like a
living thing. Maudie and Fred Booty had cherished it, they handed it on
to Mrs. Ransome spotless and intact. Spotless an