"I say," said Ransome, suddenly moved, "you take a lot more interest in it 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.