Up till then his mother had kept silence. She had let him rave. "Poor boy," she had said to herself, "he doesn't mean it. It'll do him good."
But when he talked about not having to pay for it, that reminded her that paying for it was just what he would have to do.
"How'll you manage," she said now, "about the children? I can take them for a week or two or more while you get settled."
"Would you?"
It was a way out for the present.
"I'd take them altogether—I'd love to, Ranny—if it wasn't for your Father bein' ill."
In spite of the cataclysm, she still by sheer force of habit kept it up.
"I don't want you to take them altogether," he said.
"I could do it—if you was to come with them—"
That, indeed, was what she wanted, the heavenly possibility she had sighted from the first. But she had hardly dared to suggest it. Even now, putting out her tremorous feeler, she shrank back from his refusal.