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.
"Why, Ranny, it sounds almost too good to be true!"
"I know it does. That's why sometimes I think I'll be had over it yet. I say to myself Granville looks jolly innocent, but he'll score off me, you bet, before he's done."
"_That's_ what tickles me," said Ranny. "Sometimes, when I come home of a evening and find him still sittin' there, cockin' his little eyes as if he was goin' to have a game with me, it comes over me that he's up to something, and--what do you think I do?"
"I don't know, Ranny." She almost whispered it.
"How _can_ you?" She was treating Granville as he did, exactly as if it was alive.
"Yes. I see it." (Of course she saw it.) "Still--there's something about him all the same."
There was something about everything that was Ranny's, something that touched her, something that made her love it, because she loved him. Winny couldn't have burst out laughing in its face.
"I'm glad I came," she said. "Because now I can see you."
He misunderstood. "I hope you will, Winky--very often."
He looked away. Something in her voice moved him unspeakably. For one moment he saw into the heart of her--placid, profound, and pure.
He was going down the Avenue with her now. For in that moment he had felt the beauty of her and the sadness. He couldn't bear to think of her "seeing herself home," going back alone to that little room in St. Ann's Terrace, where some day, when Maudie married, she would be left alone. The least he could do was to walk with her a little way.
"I say, Win," he said, presently, "why ever haven't you come before?" He really wondered.