in his joy, set up a prolonged ringing of his bicycle bell,
as it were the cry of his young soul, a shrill song of triumph and
liberation and delight. And in his own vivid phrase, he "let her rip."

Of course he was a prodigal, a wastrel, a spendthrift. Going the pace,
he was, with a vengeance, like a razzling-dazzling, devil-may-care young
dog.

A prodigal driven by the lust of speed, dissipating his divine energies
in this fierce whirling of the wheels; scattering his youth to the sun
and his strength to the wind in the fury of riotous "biking." A
drunkard, mad-drunk, blind-drunk with the draught of his onrush.

That was Ranny on a Sunday morning.

* * * * *

He returned, at one o'clock, to a dinner of roast mutton and apple tart.
Conversation was sustained, for Mercier's benefit, at the extreme pitch
of politeness and precision. It seemed to Ranny that at Sunday dinner
his father reached, socially, a very high level. It seemed so to Mrs.
Ransome as she bloomed and flushed in a brief return of her beauty above
the mutton and the tart. She bloomed and flushed every time that Mr.
Ransome did anything that proved his goodness and his wisdom. Sunday was
the day in which she most believed in him, the day set apart for her
worship of him.

By what blindfolded pieties, what subterfuges, what evasions she had
achieved her own private superstition was unknown, even to herself. It
was by courage and the magic of personality--some evocation of her lost
gaiety and charm--but above all by courage that she had contrived to
impose it upon other people.

The cult of Mr. Ransome reached its height at four o'clock on this
Sunday afternoon, when Ranny's Uncle John Randall (Junior) and Aunt
Randall dropped in to tea. Both Mr. and Mrs. Randall believed in Mr.
Ransome with the fervent, immovable faith of innocence that has once for
all taken an idea into its head. Long ago they had taken it into their
heads that Mr. Ransome was a wise and good man. They had taken it on
hearsay, on conjecture, on perpetual suggestion conveyed by Mrs.
Ransome, and on the grounds--absolutely incontrovertible--that they had
never heard a word to the contrary. Never, until the other day, when
that young Mercier came to Wandsworth. And, as Mrs. Randall said,
everybody knew what he was. Whatever it was that Mr. Randall had heard
from young Mercier and told to Mrs. Randall, the two had agreed to hold
their tongues about it,