ays, soft
words, cajoleries, caresses that charmed her in her secret desolation.
Balancing himself on the arm of her chair, he had his face hidden in the
nape of her neck, where he affected ecstasy and the sniffing in of
fragrance, as if his mother were a flower.

"What do you _do_?" said Ranny. "Do you bury yourself in violets all
night, or what?"

"Violets indeed! Get along with you!"

"Violets aren't in it with your neck, Mother--nor roses neither. What
did God Almighty think he was making when he made you?"

"Don't you dare to speak so," said his mother, smiling secretly.

"Lord bless you! _He_ don't mind," said Ranny. "He's not like Par."

And he plunged into her neck again and burrowed there.

"Ranny, if you knew how you worried me, you wouldn't do it. You reelly
wouldn't. I don't know what'll come to you, goin' on so reckless."

"It's because I love you," said Ranny, half stifled with his burrowing.
"You fair drive me mad. I could eat you, Mother, and thrive on it."

"Get along with you! There! You're spoiling all my Sunday lace."

Ranny emerged, and his mother looked at him.

"Such a sight as you are. If you could see yourself," she said.

She raised her hand and stroked, not without tenderness, his rumpled
hair.

"P'r'aps--If you had a sweetheart, Ran, you'd leave off makin' a fool of
your old mother."

"I wouldn't leave off kissin' her," said he.

And then, suddenly, it struck him that he had never kissed Winny. He
hadn't even thought of it. He saw her fugitive, swift-darting,
rebellious rather than reluctant under his embrace; and at the thought
he blushed, suddenly, all over.

His mother was unaware that his kisses had become dreamy, tentative,
foreboding. She said to herself: "When his time comes there'll be no
holding him. But he isn't one that'll be in a hurry, Ranny isn't."

She took comfort from that thought.

CHAPTER VI

Ranny had received his first intimation that he was not a free man. And
it had come upon him with something of a shock. He had made his burst
for freedom five years ago, when he refused to be a Pharmaceutical
Chemist in his father's shop, because he could not stand his father's
ubiquity. And yet he was not free to leave his father's house; for he
did not see how, as things were going, he could leave his mother. He was
not free to ask his friends there either; not, that was to say, friends
who were strangers to his father and the Headache. Above all, he wa