"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.