He was aware of her attitude; he was aware, further, that it would be their attitude at Wandsworth. They would all treat him like that, as if he were bereaved. They would not lose, nor allow him to lose for an instant, their awestruck sense of it. That was why he dreaded going there, why he had put it off till the last possible moment, which was about three o'clock in the afternoon. His Uncle Randall would be there. He would have to be told. He might as well tell him while he was about it. His wife's action had been patent and public; it was not a thing that could be hushed up, or minimized, or explained away. As he thought of all this, of what he would have to say, to go into, to handle, every moment wound him up to a higher and higher pitch of nervous tension. His mother opened the door to him. She greeted him with a certain timidity, an ominous hesitation; and from the expression of her face you might have gathered, in spite of her kiss, that she was not entirely glad to see him; that she had something up her sleeve, something that she desired to conceal from him. It was as if by way of concealing it that she let him in stealthily with no more opening of the door than was absolutely necessary for his entrance. "You haven't brought Vi'let?" she whispered. "No." They went softly together through the shop, darkened by the blinds that were drawn for Sunday. In the little passage beyond he paused at the door of the back parlor. "Where's Father?" She winced at the word "Father," so out of keeping with his habitual levity. It was the first intimation that there was something wrong with him. "He's upstairs, my dear, in His bed." "What's the matter with him?" "It's the Headache." She went on to explain, taking him as it were surreptitiously into the little room, that the Headache had been frequent lately, not to say continuous; not even Sundays were exempt. "He's a sad sufferer," she said. Instead of replying with something suitable, Ranny set his teeth. She had sat down helplessly, and as she spoke she gazed up at him where he remained standing by the chimney-piece; her look pleaded, deprecated, yet obstinately endeavored to deceive. But for once Ranny was blind to the pathos of her deception. Vaguely her foolish secrecy irritated him. "Look here, Mother," he said, "I want to talk to you. I've got to tell you something." "It's not anything about your Father, Ranny?" "No, it is not." (She turned to him from her trouble with visible relief.) "It's about my wife." "Vi'let?" "She's left me." "Left you? What d'you mean, Ranny?" "She's gone off--Bolted." "When?" "Last night, I suppose--to Paris." She stared at him strangely, without sympathy, without comprehension. It was almost as if in her mind she accused him of harboring some monstrous hallucination. With her eternal instinct for suppression she fought against it, she refused to take it in. He felt himself unequal to pressing it on her more than that.