very grave, very earnest,
absolutely determined, and, child that she still was, absolutely unaware
of the impossibility of the thing that she proposed. She was blind to
herself, blind to all appearances, blind to all aspects of the case, but
one, his desolation and his necessity.

"I can't leave you. I wouldn't be happy if I didn't stay. You might be
taken bad or something, in the night."

"You can't stay, Winny. It wouldn't do." They were the words she had
used to him, in her wisdom, when he had asked her to make her home with
him and Violet.

But the vision of propriety, which he raised and presented thus for her
consideration, it was nothing to her. She swept it all aside.

"But I _must_," she said. "There's Baby."

He remembered then that little one, above in Violet's deserted room.
Almost she had persuaded him, but for that secret sanity which had him
in its care.

"I'll take him. You must go now," he said, firmly. "Now this minute."

He looked for her hat and coat, found them and put her into them,
handling her with an extreme inflexibility of manner and tenderness of
touch, as if she had been a child.

"Well, then," she compromised. "Let me help you move him."

He let her; and they went upstairs and into Violet's room. Winny had
removed every sign of disorder left by Violet in the precipitancy of her
flight. Between them, very gently, they carried the cot, with the
sleeping baby in it, out of the room of the love knots and the rosebuds
into Ranny's room. They set the cot close up against the side of his bed
with the rail down so that Ranny's arms might reach out to Baby where he
lay. Dossie's little bed was drawn up at the foot. They stood together
for a moment, looking at the two children, at Dossie, all curled up and
burrowing into her pillow, and at Baby, lying by Ranny's bed as a
nursling lies by its mother.

They were silent as the same thought tore at them.

Night after night, for years, as long as Dossie and Baby were little,
Ranny would lie like that, on that narrow bed of his, shut in by the two
cots, one at his side and the other at his feet. And to Winny it had
come, for Ranny had rubbed it into her (tenderly enough; but he had
rubbed it in), that this was the last night when she could stand beside
him there. She had tried so hard to hold him and Violet together; and
all the time it had been Violet who had held her and him. It was
Violet's presence that had made it possible for her to go i