Up till then his mother had kept silence. She had let him rave. "Poor boy," she had said to herself, "he doesn't mean it. It'll do him good." But when he talked about not having to pay for it, that reminded her that paying for it was just what he would have to do. "How'll you manage," she said now, "about the children? I can take them for a week or two or more while you get settled." "Would you?" It _was_ a way out for the present. "I'd take them altogether--I'd love to, Ranny--if it wasn't for your Father bein' ill." In spite of the cataclysm, she still by sheer force of habit kept it up. "I don't want you to take them altogether," he said. "I could do it--if you was to come with them--" That, indeed, was what she wanted, the heavenly possibility she had sighted from the first. But she had hardly dared to suggest it. Even now, putting out her tremorous feeler, she shrank back from his refusal. "If you could let Granville--and come and live with us." His silence and his embarrassment pierced her to the heart. "Won't you?" she ventured. "Well--I've got to think of them. For them, in some ways, the poor old Humming-bird might, you see, be almost as bad as Virelet." She knew. She had known it all the time. She had even got so far in knowledge as to see that Ranny's father was in a measure responsible for Ranny's marriage. If Ranny had had more life, more freedom, and more happiness around him in his home, he would not have been driven, as he was, to Violet. "Well, dear, you just think it over. If you don't come you must get somebody." Yes. He must get somebody. He had thought of that. "It can't be Winny Dymond, dear." "No," he assented. "It can't be Winny Dymond." "And you'll have to come to me until I can find you some one." They left it so. After all, it made things easier, the method that his mother had brought to such perfection, her way of skating rapidly over brittle surfaces, of circumnavigating all profound unpleasantness, and of plunging, when she did plunge, only into the vague, the void. And through it all he was aware of the brittleness, the unpleasantness, the profundity of what was immediately before him, how to deal with poor Winny and her innocent enormity; the impropriety, as it had been presented to him, of her devotion. But even this problem, so torturing to his nerves, was presently lost sight of in the simple, practical difficulty of detaching Winny from the children; or rather, of detaching the children from Winny, of tearing, as they had to tear, them from her, piecemeal, first Baby, then Dossie, with every circumstance of barbarous cruelty. It was a spectacle, an operation of such naked agony that before it the most persistent, the most incorruptible sense of propriety broke down. It was too much altogether for Mrs. Ransome. Dossie was the worst. She had strength in her little fingers, and she clung.