"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.
"That's a nice little girl I see sometimes down at your place. That Winny Dymond. Is she a friend of Vi'let's?"
Ranny said she was.