all than Virelet does."

"She's used to it," said Winny. "Besides, I always take an interest in
other people's houses."

She pondered. They were both leaning out of the back bedroom window now,
looking down into the garden.

"Think of all those little empty houses, Ranny, and the people that'll
come and live in them. It seems somehow so beautiful their coming and
finding them and getting things for them; and at the same time it seems
somehow sad." She paused.

"I don't mean that _you're_ sad, Ranny. You know what I mean."

He did. He had felt it too, the beauty and the sadness, but he couldn't
have put it into words. It was the sadness and the beauty of life.

It was queer, he thought, how Winny felt as he did about most things in
life.

But Winny's joy over the house was nothing to her joy over the garden,
the garden that Ranny had made, and over the little tree that he had
planted. It was the most beautiful and wonderful tree in the whole
world. For in her eyes everything that Ranny did and that he made was
beautiful and wonderful. It could not be otherwise: because she loved
him.

And oh! she had the most intense appreciation of Granville, of the name
and of the personality. She took it all in. Trust Winny.

And as they stood in the gateway at parting, he told her of the system
by which in twenty, no, in not much more than nineteen years' time
Granville would be his own.

"Why, Ranny, it sounds almost too good to be true!"

"I know it does. That's why sometimes I think I'll be had over it yet. I
say to myself Granville looks jolly innocent, but he'll score off me,
you bet, before he's done."

"He _does_ look innocent," said Winny.

He did. (And how Winny took it in!)

"_That's_ what tickles me," said Ranny. "Sometimes, when I come home of
a evening and find him still sittin' there, cockin' his little eyes as
if he was goin' to have a game with me, it comes over me that he's up to
something, and--what do you think I do?"

"I don't know, Ranny." She almost whispered it.

"I burst out laughin' in his face."

"How _can_ you?" She was treating Granville as he did, exactly as if it
was alive.

"Well--you see how comical he is."

"Yes. I see it." (Of course she saw it.) "Still--there's something about
him all the same."

There was something about everything that was Ranny's, something that
touched her, something that made her love it, because she loved him.
Winny couldn't have burst out laughing