His father's affairs were worse than anything he had believed. For, except for that terror born of his own private superstition, he had not really looked forward to disaster on an overwhelming scale.... He had imagined his father's business as surviving him only for a little while, and his father's debts as entailing perhaps strict economy for years. But for the actual figures he was not prepared. And how his father, limited as he was in his resources and destitute, you would have thought, of all opportunity for wild expenditure, how he could have contrived to owe the amount he did owe passed Ranny's understanding. Into that pit of insolvency there went all that was fetched by the sale of the stock and the goodwill of the business and all that Mrs. Ransome had put into the business, including what she had saved out of her tiny income. As for Ranny's savings and the sum he had borrowed--the whole thirty pounds--they went to pay for the funeral and the grave and the monumental stone. There could be no divorce. Divorce was not to be thought of for more than two years, when he would have got his rise. He broke the news to Winny, sitting with her in their little halfway grove, the place consecrated to Ranny's confidences. "I can't do different," he said, summing it all up. "Of course, you can't. Never mind, dear. Let's go on as we are." It was what Violet had said to him, but with how different a meaning! "But Winky--it means waiting years. It'll be more than two before I can get a divorce--and we can't marry till six months after. That's three years. I can't bear to ask you to wait so long." "Don't worry about me. I'm quite happy." "You don't know how much happier you would be. Me too." She pressed her face against his shoulder. "I don't think I could be any happier than I am." "You don't know," he repeated. "You don't know anything at all." "I know I love you and you me, and that's enough." "Oh--_is_ it?" "It's the great thing." "Winny, d'you know, that if poor Father hadn't died when he did--we missed it by a day. To think it could happen like that!" He clinched it with, "This Combined Maze has been a bit too much for you and me." CHAPTER XXX Mrs. Ransome for the first time in her life was thinking. She called it thinking, although that was no word for it, for its richness, its amplitude, its peculiar secret certainty. You might say that for the first time in her life Mrs. Ransome was fully conscious; that, with an extraordinary vividness and clarity she saw things, not as she believed and desired them to be, but as they were. She saw, for the first time since Mr. Ransome's death, that she was happy; or rather, that she had been happy for more than two years, that is to say, ever since Mr. Ransome's death. And this vision of her happiness, of her iniquitous and disgraceful satisfaction, was shocking to Mrs. Ransome. She would have preferred to think that ever since Mr. Ransome's death she had been heartbroken.