e believed possible. Looking back on that first year, he
seemed to have been always taking her somewhere. She wasn't happy when
he didn't.

No, and she hadn't been very happy when he did. He would never forget
that week they had spent at Southend last Whitsuntide, when he got his
holiday. And it had all eaten into money. Not that he grudged it; but
the fact remained. His margin was gone; half his savings were gone; his
income had suffered a permanent shrinkage of two pounds a year.

Impossible to keep a servant without the aid of the lodger he abhorred.
But with it not only possible but easy, easy as saying how d'you do.
Except for the presence of the loathsome lodger, nothing would be
changed. The back bedroom was there all ready, eating its head off; and
for all they used the front sitting-room, they might just as well not
have had one.

They could get somebody who would be out all day.

He thought about it for three weeks; but before he made up his mind he
talked it over with his mother. She had come to see them late one
evening in June, and he had walked back with her. She was tired, she
said, and they had found a seat in a little three-cornered grove where
the public footpath goes to Wandsworth High Street.

In this favorable retreat Ranny disclosed to his mother as much as he
could of his affairs. Mrs. Ransome didn't like the idea of the lodger
any more than he did, but she admitted that it was a way out of it.
"Only," she said, "if I was you I should have a lady. Some one you know
about. Some one who might look after Vi'let."

"That's right. But Virelet would have to look after her, you see."

"Vi'let's no more idea of looking after anybody than the cat."

"It isn't her fault, Mother."

"I'm not saying it's her fault. But it's a pity all the same you should
have to put up with it."

"It's larks for me to what Vi puts up with. I shouldn't mind, if--"

He drew back, shy before the trouble of his soul.

"If what, Ranny?" she said, gently.

"If she seemed to care a bit more for the kid. Sometimes I think she
actually--"

Though he could not say it, Mrs. Ransome knew.

"Don't you think that, Ranny. Don't you think it, my dear."

She was playing at the old game of hiding things, and she expected him
to keep it up. She had never admitted for one moment that his father
drank; and she wasn't going to admit, or to let him admit, for a moment
that his wife was a bad mother.

So she changed the subject.