"No one knows," Mrs. Ransome was saying, "what 'E was thinking and what 'E was feeling--what went on inside him no one ever knew. For all he said about it you'd have thought he didn't take much notice of what happened--Ranny's trouble--and yet I know he felt it something awful. It preyed on 'is mind, poor Ranny being left like that. Why, it was after that, if you remember, that he began to break up. I put all his illness down to that. "And then the children--you might say he didn't take much notice of them, but 'E was thinking about them all the time, you may depend upon it. 'E sent for them the Sunday before he died. I'm glad he did, too. Aren't you, Ranny?" "Yes, Mother," Ranny said, and choked. "It'll be something for them to remember him by when they grow up. But they'll never know what was in his heart. None of us ever knew nor ever will know, now." "He was a good man, Emmy, and a kind man--and just. I never knew any one more just than Fulleymore. We were saying so only last night, weren't we?" "Yes, John," said Mrs. Randall. "We were saying you could always depend upon his word. And, as _you_ say, there were things in him we never knew--and never shall know." And so it went on, with tearful breaks and long, oppressive silences, until some one would think of some as yet unmentioned quality of Mr. Ransome's. Every now and then, in the silences, one of them would be visited by some involuntary memory of his unpleasantness and of the furtive vice that had destroyed him, and would thrust the thought back with horror, as outrageous, indecent, and impossible. They all spoke in voices of profound emotion and with absolute, unfaltering conviction. "We shall never know what was in him." Always they came back to that, they dwelt on it, they clung to it. Under all the innocence and the delusion it was as if, through their grief, they touched reality, they felt the unaltered, unapparent splendor, and testified to the mystery, to the ultimate and secret sanctity of man's soul. * * * * * Of all that Ransome was aware obscurely, he shared their sense of that hidden and incalculable and enduring life. But his own grief was different from theirs. It was something unique, peculiar to himself and incommunicable. Even he had not realized what was at the bottom of his grief until he found himself alone with it, walking with it on the road to Southfields. He had left the Randalls with his mother and had escaped, with an irritable longing for the darkness and the open air. He knew that the reason why he wanted to get away from them was that his grief was so different from theirs.