He went upstairs very softly to his room. In a jar on the chimney-piece he found a small key. Still going softly, he let himself into the little unfurnished room over the porch where boxes were stored. Among them was the trunk which contained Violet's long-abandoned clothes. He unlocked it, rummaged, deliberated, selected finally a serge skirt, draggled but warm; a pair of woolen stockings, and shoes, stout for all their shabbiness.
And as he knelt over the trunk his mind cleared suddenly, and he knew what he was going to do. He was going to fetch a cab, if he could get one, and take her away in it. If she was staying in London he would take her straight back to whatever place she had come from. If she came from a distance he would see her started on her journey home. He was prepared, if necessary, to hang about for hours in any station, waiting for any train that would remove her. If the worst came to the worst he would take a room for her in some hotel and leave her there. But he would not have her sitting with him till past midnight in his house. It was too risky. He knew what he was about. He knew that there was danger in any course that could give rise to the suspicion of cohabitation. He knew, not only that cohabitation in itself was fatal, but that the injured husband who invoked the law must refrain from the very appearance of that evil.
Of course, he knew what Violet had come for. She was beginning to get uneasy about her divorce. And, personally, he couldn't see where the risk came in unless the suit was defended. And it wasn't going to be defended. It couldn't be. The suspicion of collusion would in his case be a far more dangerous thing. It was what he had been specially warned against.
These two ideas, collusion and cohabitation, struggled for supremacy in Ranny's brain. They seemed to him mutually exclusive; and all it came to was that, with his suit so imminent, he couldn't be too careful. He must not, even for the sake of decency, show Violet any consideration that would be prejudicial to his case.
Whereupon it struck him that the most perilous, most embarrassing detail of the situation was the disgusting accident of the weather. In common decency he couldn't have turned her out of doors in that rain.
And under all the confused working of his intelligence his instinct told him that what happened was not an accident at all. His inmost prescience hinted at foredoomed, irremediable suffering; profound, irreparable disaster.
But with his mind set upon its purpose he gathered up the shabby skirt, the stockings, and the shoes, he took his own thick overcoat from its peg in the passage; he warmed them well before the sitting-room fire.
Violet watched him with an air of detachment, of innocent incomprehension, as if these preparations in no way concerned herself. She was sitting in the chair now, with her bare feet in the fender.
He then put the kettle on the fire, and her eyes kindled and looked up at him.