When he caught sight of the silent and austere young man in the doorway, Baby let go his fascinating toes. He chuckled with delight. He jerked himself more than ever up and down. He struggled to be free, to be lifted up and embraced by the young man. Silence and austerity were no deterrent to Baby, so assured was he of his position, of his welcome, of the safe, warm, tingling place that would presently be his in the hollow of the young man's arm. The desire of it made Baby's arms and his body writhe, with a heartrending agitation, in his little knitted coat. All this innocent ecstasy of Baby the young man met with silence and austerity and somber eyes. With Winny's eyes on him he indeed lifted Baby up, disclosing, first, his pathetically bunched and bundled back, and then his face, exquisitely contorted. And Winny, who had _forgotten_ for a minute, laughed. "He is funny, isn't he? He smiles just like you do, all up in the corners like." At that the young man's arms tightened, and he gripped Baby with passion to his breast. He kissed him, looking down at him, passionately, somberly. Winny saw, and the impulse seized her to efface herself, to vanish. "I must be going," she said, "or I shall be late for dinner. Can you manage, Ranny? There's a beefsteak pie. I made it yesterday." As she turned Dossie trotted after her; and as she vanished Dossie cried, inconsolably. He managed, beautifully, with the beefsteak pie. His sense of bereavement which still weighed on him was no longer attached in any way to Violet. He could not say precisely what it _was_ attached to. There it was. Only, when he thought of Violet it seemed to him incomprehensible, not to say absurd, that he should feel it. CHAPTER XXV In the afternoon Winny came again for the children, so that he could go to Wandsworth unencumbered. The weather was favorable to her idea, which was not to be in Ranny's house more than she could help, but to be seen, if seen she must be, out of doors with the children, in a public innocence, affording the presumption that Violet was still there. Above all, she was not going to be seen with Ranny, or to be seen by him too much, if she could help it. With her sense of the sadness of his errand, the sense (that came to her more acutely with the afternoon) of things imminent, of things, she knew not what, that would have to be done, she avoided him as she would have avoided a bereaved person preoccupied with some lamentable business relating to the departed.