Hilary's words rang in his ears. "I see that we get a little more destitute every day." It was true. Every day the Margerisons seemed to lose something more. To-night Peter had lost something he could ill afford to part with—another degree of Denis Urquhart's regard. That seemed to be falling from him bit by bit; perhaps that was why he felt so cold. However desperately he clung to the remnants, as he had clung since that last interview in Venice, he could not think to keep them much longer at this rate.

As he walked up and down the platform, his cold hands thrust deep into his pockets, he was contemplating another loss—one that would hurt absurdly much.

If Hilary felt that he needed more money so badly, he must have it. There were certain things Peter declined to do. He wouldn't borrow from the Urquharts; but he would sell his last treasured possession to soothe Hilary for a little while. The Berovieri goblet had been bought for a lot of money, and could at any moment be sold for a lot of money. The Berovieri goblet must go.

That evening, in the tiny attic room, Peter took the adorable thing out of the box where it lay hid, and set it on the chest of drawers, in front of the candle, so that the flame shone through the blue transparency like the setting sun through a stained-glass window.

It was very, very beautiful. Peter sat on the bed and looked at it, as a devotee before a shrine. In itself it was very beautiful, a magic thing of blue colour and deep light and pure shadow and clear, lovely form. Peter loved it for itself, and for its symbolic character. For it was a symbol of the world of great loveliness that did, he knew, exist. When he had been turned out of that world into a grey and dusty place, he had kept that one thing, to link him with loveliness and light. Peter was a materialist: he loved things, their shapes and colours, with a passion that blinded him to the beauty of the colourless, the formless, the super-sensuous.

He slipped his fingers up the chalice's slim stem and round its cool bowl, and smiled for pleasure that such a thing existed—had existed for four hundred years—to gladden the world.

"Well, anyone would have thought I should have smashed you before now," he remarked, apostrophising it proudly. "But I haven't. I shall take you to Christie's myself to-morrow, as whole as you were the day Leslie gave you me."

It was fortunate that Leslie was out of reach, and would not hear of the transaction. If he had been in England, Peter would have felt bound to offer him the goblet, and he would have paid for it too enormous a price to be endured. Leslie's generosity was sometimes rather overwhelming.

When Peter took Hilary and Peggy the cheque he had received, and told them what he had received it for, Hilary said, "I suppose these things must be. It was fortunate you did not ask my advice, Peter; I should have hesitated what to say. It is uncommonly like bartering one's soul for guineas. To what we are reduced!"

He was an artist, and cared for beautiful goblets. He would much rather have borrowed the money, or had it given him.

Peggy, who was not an artist, said, "Oh, Peter darling, how sweet of you! Now I really can pay the butcher; I've had to hide from him the last few mornings, in the coal-hole. You dear child, I hope you won't miss that nice cup too much. When our ship comes in you shall have another."

"When," sighed Hilary, who was feeling over-worked that evening. (He did advertisement pictures for a weekly paper; a sordid and degrading pursuit.)

"Well," said Peggy hopefully, "the boarders we have now really do pay their rent the way they never did in Venice. That's such a comfort. If only Larry's cough gets off his chest without turning to bronchitis, I will be quite happy. But these loathsome fogs! And that odious man coming round wanting to know why aren't the children attending school! 'I'm sure,' I said to him, 'I wish they were; the house would be the quieter missing them; but their father insists on educating them himself, because he won't let them mix up with the common children in the school; they're by way of being little gentry, do you see,' I said, 'though indeed you mightn't think it to look at them.' Oh dear me, he was so impolite; he wouldn't believe that Hilary was doing his duty by them, though I assured him that he read them all the 'Ancient Mariner' yesterday morning while they watched him dress, and that I was teaching them the alphabet whenever I had a spare minute. But nothing would satisfy him; and off the two eldest must go to the Catholic school next week to be destroyed by the fog and to pick up with all the ragamuffins in the district."

"An abominable, cast-iron system," Hilary murmured mechanically. "Of a piece with all the other institutions of an iniquitous state."

"And what do you think," added Peggy, who was busy putting a patch in Silvio's knickerbockers, "Guy Vyvian turned up out of nowhere and called this afternoon, bad manners to him for a waster. When he found you were out, Hilary, he asked where was Rhoda; he'd no notion of sitting down to listen to me talking. Rhoda was out at work too, of course; I told him it wasn't most of us could afford to play round in the afternoons the way he did. I suppose he'll come again, bothering and upsetting the child just when she's settling down a bit. I've thought her seeming brighter lately; she likes going about with you, Peter. But there'll be pretty doings again when that man comes exciting her."

"Vyvian is a cad and a low fellow," Hilary said, "and I always regretted being forced into partnership with him; but I suppose one can't kick one's past acquaintances from the door. I, at least, cannot. Some people can and do; they may reconcile it with their standards of decency if they choose; but I cannot. Vyvian must come if he likes, and we must be hospitable to him. We must ask him to dinner if he comes again."

"Yes," sniffed Peggy, "I can see him! Sticking his fork into the potatoes and pretending he can't get it through! Oh, have him to dinner if you like; he must just make the best of what he gets if he comes. He'll be awfully rude to the rest, too, but I'll apologise for him beforehand."

"Though a cad," Hilary observed, "Vyvian is less of a vacuous fool than most of the members of our present delightful house-party. He at least knows something of art and literature, and can converse without jarring one's taste violently by his every word. He is not, after all, a Miss Matthews or a Mr. Bridger. Apologies, therefore, are scarcely called for, perhaps."

Peggy said, "What a solemn face, Peter. Is it the Vyvian man, or the beautiful cup, that we've never half thanked you for getting rid of yet?"

Peter said, "It's the Vyvian man. He makes me feel solemn. You see, I promised Mrs. Johnson faithfully to keep Rhoda out of his clutches, if I could."

"Darling, what a silly promise. Oh, of course, we'll all do our best; but if he wants to clutch her, the silly little bird, he'll surely do it. Not that I'm saying he does want to; I daresay he only wants to upset her and make her his slave and then run away again to his own place, the Judas."

"But I don't want him to do that. Rhoda will be unhappier than ever again."

"Oh, well, I wouldn't wonder if, when Rhoda sees him again now, she sees what a poor creature it is, after all. It may be a turning-point with her, and who knows will she perhaps settle down afterwards and be a reasonable girl and darn her stockings and wear a collar?"

"If one is to talk of stockings," began Hilary, "I noticed Caterina's to-day, and really, you know...."

Peggy bit off her cotton and murmured, "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, what's to become of us all?"



CHAPTER XIII

THE LOSS OF THE SINGLE STATE

The man Vyvian came. He came again and again, but not to dinner. Perhaps he suspected about the potatoes, and thought that they would not even be compensated for by the pleasure of sneering at the boarders. He came in the evenings and sat in the sitting-room and drank coffee (the only thing that was well cooked in Peggy's household), and talked to Hilary, and looked at Rhoda. Rhoda, embroidering apple-boughs on a green dress-front, shivered and trembled under his eyes.

"Now I know," thought Peter, seeing Vyvian look, "what villains in books are really like. Vyvian is just like one; specially about the eyes." He was sitting near Rhoda, playing that sort of patience called calcul, distinguished from other patiences by the fact that it comes out; that was why Peter liked it. He had refused to-night to join in the game the others were playing, which was animal grab, though usually he enjoyed it very much. Peter liked games, though he seldom won them. But this evening he played patience by himself and sat by Rhoda and consulted her at crucial moments, and babbled of many things and knew whenever Vyvian looked and Rhoda shook. At half-past nine Vyvian stopped talking to Hilary and crossed the room and took the arm-chair on Rhoda's other side.

"Enthralling evenings you spend here," he remarked, including in his glance Rhoda's embroidery, Peter's patience, and the animal grab table, from which cheerfully matter-of-fact farmyard and jungle cries proceeded with spirit.

Rhoda said nothing. Her head was bent over her work. The next moment she pricked her finger violently, and started. Before she could get her handkerchief out, Vyvian had his, and was enveloping her small hand in it.

"Too bad," he said, in a voice so low that the farmyard cries drowned it as far as Peter was concerned. "Poor little finger." He held it and the handkerchief closely in his two hands.

Rhoda, her colour flooding and ebbing over her thin face and thin neck down to the insertion yoke of her evening blouse, trembled like a captured bird. Her eyes fell from his look; a bold, bad look Peter thought, finding literary terminology appropriate.

The next moment the little table on which Peter was playing toppled over onto the floor with a small crash, and all his cards were scattered on the carpet.

Rhoda started and looked round, pulling her hand away as if a spell was broken.

"Dear me," said Peter regretfully, "it was just on coming out, too. I shan't try again to-night; it's not my night, obviously." He was picking up the cards. Rhoda watched him silently.

"Do you know calcul, Mr. Vyvian?" Peter enquired, collecting scattered portions of the pack from under the arm-chair.

Mr. Vyvian stared at Peter's back, which was the part of him most visible at the moment.

"I really can't say I have the pleasure; no." (That, Peter felt certain, was an insolent drawl.)

"Would you like to learn it?" said Peter politely. "Are you fond of patience?"

"I can't say I am," said Mr. Vyvian.

"Oh! Then you would like calcul. People who are really fond of other patiences don't; they despise it because it comes out. I don't like any other sort of patience; I'm not clever enough; so I like this. Let me teach you, may I?"

Vyvian got up.

"Thanks; you're quite too kind. On the whole, I think I can conduct my life without any form of patience, even one which comes out."

"You have a turn, then, Miss Johnson," said Peter, arranging the cards. "Perhaps it'll come out for you, though it won't for me to-night."

"Since you are all so profitably occupied," said Vyvian, "I think I will say good night."

Peter said, "Oh, must you?... Good night, then. We play calcul most nights, so you can learn it some other time if you'd like to."

"A delightful prospect," Vyvian murmured, his glance again comprehensively wandering round the room. "A happy family party you seem here.... Good night." He bent over Rhoda with his ironic politeness.

"I was going to ask you if you would come out with me to-morrow evening to a theatre.... But since your evenings seem to be so pleasantly filled otherwise...."

She looked up at him a moment, wavered, met his dark eyes, was caught by the old domination, and swept off her feet as of old.

"Oh, ... I should like to come...." She was a little breathless.

"Good! I will call for you then, at seven, and we will dine together. Au revoir."

"He swept her a mocking bow and was gone," Peter murmured to himself.

Then he looked at Rhoda, and found her eyes upon his face, wide, frightened, bewildered, and knew in a flash that she had never meant to consent to go out with Vyvian, that she had been caught by the old power he had over her and swept off her feet. That knowledge gave him confidence, and he could say, "You don't want to go, do you? Let me go after him and tell him."

"Oh," she pressed her hands together in front of her. "But I must go—I said I would."

Peter was on his feet and out of the door in a second. He saw Vyvian in the passage downstairs, putting on his coat. He spoke from half-way down the stairs:

"Oh, Miss Johnson asks me to say she is sorry she can't go with you to-morrow night after all; she finds she has another engagement."

Vyvian turned and looked up at him, a slight smile lifting his lip.

"Really?" was all he said. "All the same, I think I will call at seven and try to persuade her to change her mind again. Good night."

As plainly as possible he had said to Peter, "I believe you to be lying." Peter had no particular objection to his believing that; he was not proud; but he did object to his calling at seven and trying to persuade Rhoda to change her mind again, for he believed that that would be a task easy of achievement.

He went back into the sitting-room. Rhoda was sitting still, her hands twisted together on the green serge on her lap. Peter sat down by her and said, "Will you come out with me instead to-morrow evening?" and she looked at him, her teeth clenched over her lower lip as if to steady it, and said after a moment, forlornly, "If you like."

It was so much less exciting than going with Vyvian would have been, that Peter felt compunction.

"You shall choose the play," he said. "'Peter Pan,' do you think? Or something funny—'The Sins of Society,' or something?"

Rhoda whispered "Anything," nearly on the edge of tears. A vividness had flashed again into her grey life, and she was trying to quench it. She had heroically, though as an afterthought, flung an extinguishing douche of water at it; but now that she had done so she was melting into unheroic self-pity.

"I want to go to bed," she said shakily, and did so, feeling for her pocket-handkerchief as she crossed the room.

At a quarter to seven the next evening Peter looked for Rhoda, thinking it well that they should be out of the house by seven o'clock, but couldn't find her, till Miss Clegson said she had met her "going into church" as she herself came out. Peter went to the church to find her. Rhoda didn't as a rule frequent churches, not believing in the creeds they taught; but even to the unbelieving a church is often a refuge.

Peter, coming into the great dim place out of the wet fog, found it again, as he had long since known it to be, a refuge from fogs and other ills of living. Far up, the seven lamps that never go out burned dimly through the blurred air. It was a gaudy place, no doubt; over-decorated; a church for the poor, who love gaudiness. Perhaps Peter too loved gaudiness. Anyhow, he loved this place and its seven lamps and its shrines and statued saints.

Surely, whatever one believed of the mysterious world and of all the other mysterious worlds that might be floating behind the veils, surely here was a very present help in trouble, a luminous brightness shining in a fog-choked world.

Peter, sitting by the door, sank into a great peace. Half-way up the church he saw Rhoda sitting very still. She too was looking up the church towards the lamps and the altar beyond them.

Presently a cassocked sacristan came and lit the vesper lights, for evensong was to be at seven, and the altar blazed out, an unearthly brilliance in the dim place. The low murmur of voices (a patient priest had been hearing confessions for an hour) ceased, and people began coming in one by one for service. Rhoda shivered a little, and got up and came down the church. Peter joined her at the door, and they passed shivering into the fog together.

"I was looking for you," said Peter, when they were out in the alley that led to the church door.

"It's time we went, isn't it," she said apathetically.

Then she added, inconsequently, "The church seems the only place where one can find a bit of peace. I can't think why, when probably it's all a fairy-tale."

"I suppose that's why," said Peter. "Fairyland is the most peaceful country there is."

"You can't get peace out of what's not true," Rhoda insisted querulously.

"Oh, I don't know.... Besides, fairy-tales aren't necessarily untrue, do you think? I don't mean that, when I call what churches teach a fairy-tale. I mean it's beautiful and romantic and full of light and colour and wonderful things happening. And it's probably the truer for that."

"D'you believe it all?" queried Rhoda; but he couldn't answer her as to that.

"I don't know. I never do know exactly what I believe. I can't think how anyone does. But yes, I think I like to believe in those things; they're too beautiful not to be true."

"It's the ugly things that are true," she said, coughing in the fog.

"Why, yes, the ugly things and the beautiful; God and the devil, if one puts it like that. Oh, yes, I believe very much in the devil; I can't believe that any street of houses could look quite like this without the help of someone utterly given over to evil thinking. We aren't, you see; none of us are ugly enough in our minds to have thought out some of the things one sees; so there must be a devil."

Rhoda was silent. He thought she was crying. He said gently, "I say, would you like to come out to-night, or would you rather be quiet at home?" It would be safe to return home by half-past seven, he thought.

She said, in a small muffled voice, that she didn't care.

A tall figure passed by them in the narrow alley, looming through the fog. Rhoda started, and shrank back against the brick wall, clutching Peter's arm. The next moment the figure passed into the circle of light thrown down by a high lamp that glimmered over a Robbia-esque plaque shrine let into the wall, and they saw that it was a cassocked priest from the clergy-house going into church. Rhoda let out her breath faintly in a sigh, and her fingers fell from Peter's coat-sleeve.

"Oh," she whispered, "I'm frightened.... Let's stay close to the church; just outside the door, where we can see the light and hear the music. I don't want to go out into the streets to-night, Peter, I want to stay here. I'm ... so frightened."

"Come inside," suggested Peter, as they turned back to the church. "It would be warmer."

But she shook her head. "No. I'd rather be outside. I don't belong in there."

Peter said, "Why not?" and she told him, "Because for me it's the ugly things that are true."

So together they stood in the porch, outside the great oak door, and heard the sound of singing stealing out, fog-softened, and smelt the smell of incense (it was the festal service of some saint) that pierced the thick air with its pungent sweetness.

They sat down on the seat in the porch, and Rhoda shivered, not with cold, and Peter waited by her very patiently, knowing that she needed him as she had never needed him before.

She told him so. "You don't mind staying, Peter? I feel safer with you than with anyone else.... You see, I'm afraid.... Oh, I can't tell you how it is I feel. When he looks at me it's as if he was drawing me and dragging me, and I feel I must get up and follow him wherever he goes. It's always been like that, since first I met him, more than a year ago. He made me care; he made me worship the ground he walked on; if he'd thrown me down and kicked me, I'd have let him. But he never cared himself; I know that now. I've known it a long time. And I've vowed to myself, and I vowed to mother when she lay dying, that I wouldn't let him have anything more to do with me. He frightens me, because he can twist me round his finger and make me care so ... and it hurts.... And he's just playing; he'll never really care. But for all I know that, I know he can get me whenever he wants me. And he's come back again to amuse himself seeing me worship him ... and he'll make me follow him about, and all the time he'll be thinking me a little fool, and I shall know it ... but I can't help it, Peter, I can't help it.... I've nothing to hold on to, to save me. If I could be religious, if I could pray, like the people in there ... but he says there's nothing in that; he's made me believe like him, and I sometimes think he only believes in himself, and that's why I can only believe in him too. So I've got nothing in the world to hold on to, and I shall be carried away and drowned...."

She was crying with strangled sobbings, her face in her thin hands.

Peter's arm was put gently about her shoulders, comforting her.

"No, you won't, Rhoda. Rhoda dear, you won't be carried away, because I shall be here, holding you. Is that any help at all?"

He felt her relax beneath his arm and lean back against him; he heard her whisper, "Yes; oh, yes. If I can hold onto you, Peter, I shall feel safe."

"Hold on, then," said Peter, "as tight as you like."

She looked up at him with wet eyes and he felt the claim and the appeal of her piercing straight into his heart.

"I could care ..." she whispered. "Are you sure, Peter?"

His arm tightened about her. He hadn't meant precisely what she had understood him to mean; at least, he hadn't translated his purpose to help her to the uttermost into a specified relation, as she was doing; but if the purpose, to be fulfilled, had to be so translated, he was ready for that too. So he said, "Quite sure, Rhoda. I want to be the most to you that you'll let me be," and her face was hidden against his coat, and her tension relaxed utterly, and she murmured, "Oh, I can be safe like that."

So they sat in silence together, between the lit sanctuary and the desolate night, and heard, as from a long way off, the sound of chanting:—

"Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace: according to thy word;

"For mine eyes have seen ..."

Later on, Rhoda said, quiet and happy now, "I've thought you cared, Peter, for some time. And last night, when I saw you hated Guy to be near me, I felt sure. But I feel I've so little to give you. So much of me is burnt away and spoilt. But it'll come back, Peter, I think, if you love me. I do love you, very much; you've been such a dear to me always, from the very first night at the Palazzo, when you spoke to me and smiled. Only I couldn't think of anyone but Guy then. But lately I've been thinking, 'Peter's worth a hundred Guys, and if only I could care for him, I should feel safe.' And I do care, ever so much; and if it's a different sort of caring from what I've felt for Guy, it's a better sort. That's a bad, black sort, that hurts; I never want any more of that. Caring for you will keep me from that, Peter."

"It's dear of you to care for me at all," said Peter. "And we won't let Guy come near us, now or ever."

"You hate him, don't you?" said Rhoda. "I know you do."

"Oh, well, I don't know that it's as bad as all that. He's more funny than anything else, it seems to me. He might have walked straight out of a novel; he does all the things they do in books, you know, and that one never thinks people really do outside them. He sneers insolently. I watch him sometimes, to see how it's done. He curls his upper lip, too, when he's feeling contemptuous; that's another nice trick that I should like to acquire. Oh, he's quite an interesting study really. You've taken him wrong, you know. You've taken him seriously. He's not meant for that."

"Oh," said Rhoda, vaguely uncomprehending. "You are a funny boy, Peter. You do talk so.... I never know if you mean half you say."

"About two-thirds, I think," said Peter. "The rest is lies. We all lie in my family, and not well either, because we're rather weak in the intellect.... Now do you feel like supper, because I do? Let's come home and have it, shall we?"

They went home through the fog, Rhoda clinging to Peter's arm as to an anchor in a sweeping sea. A great peace and security possessed her; she no longer started at the tall figures that loomed by.

They let themselves into 51 Brook Street, and blinked at one another in the lamp-lit, linoleumed little hall. Rhoda looked at herself in the glass, and said, "What a fright I am!" seeing her tear-stained countenance and straggling fog-wet locks. The dinner-bell rang, and she ran upstairs to tidy herself. Peter and she came into the dining-room together, during the soup.

"Let's tell them at once, Peter," whispered Rhoda; so Peter obediently said, as he sat down by Peggy, "Rhoda and I have just settled to marry."

"Marry?" Hilary queried, from the end of the table. "Marry whom?" And Rhoda, blushing, laughed for the first time for some days.

Peggy said, "Don't be silly, Hilary. Each other, of course, the darlings mean. Well, well, and to think I never guessed that all this time!"

"Oh," said Miss Clegson, "I did, Mrs. Margerison; I had a very shrewd suspicion, I assure you. And this evening, when Mr. Peter asked me where Miss Johnson was gone, and I told him into church, and he followed her straight away, I said to myself, 'Well, that looks like something we all know about very well!' I didn't say it to anyone else; I wouldn't breathe a word till all was settled; I knew you asked me in confidence, Mr. Peter; but I thought the more. I was always one to see things; they used to tell me I could see through a stone wall. Well, I'm sure I offer my congratulations to both of you."

"And I too, with all my heart," said Miss Matthews, the lady who did not attend ritualistic churches. "Do I understand that the happy arrangement was made in church, Miss Johnson? I gather from Miss Clegson that Mr. Peter followed you there."

"Oh, not inside, Miss Matthews," said Rhoda, blushing again, and looking rather pretty. "In the porch, we were."

Miss Matthews sniffed faintly. Such goings-on might, she conveyed, be expected in the porch of St. Austin's, with all that incense coming through the door, and all that confessing going on inside.

"Well," said Mr. Bridger, "we ought to have some champagne to drink success to the happy event. Short of that, let us fill the festive bumpers with the flowing lemonade. Pass the jug down. Here's to you, Miss Rhoda; here's to you, Mr. Peter Margerison. May you both be as happy as you deserve. No one will want me to wish you anything better than that, I'm sure."

"Here's luck, you dears," said Peggy, drinking. Engagements in general delighted her, and Peter's in particular. And poor little Rhoda was looking so bright and happy at last. Peggy wouldn't have taken it upon herself to call it a remarkably suitable alliance had she been asked; but then she hadn't been asked, and Peter was such a sweet-natured, loving, lovable dear that he would get on with anyone, and Rhoda, though sometimes a silly and sometimes fractious, was a dear little girl too. The two facts that would have occurred to some sisters-in-law, that they had extremely few pennies between them, and that Rhoda wasn't precisely of Peter's gentle extraction, didn't bother Peggy at all.

They occurred, however, to Hilary. It occurred to him that Peter would now require all his slender earnings for himself and wife, which was awkward; also that Peter really needn't have looked down to the lower middle classes for a wife. Hilary believed in gentle birth; through all his vicissitudes a pathetic pride of breeding clung to him. One might be down at heels; one might be reduced to sordid means of livelihood, even to shady schemes for enlarging one's income; but once a gentleman always so, and one was not to be ranked with the bounders, the Vyvians, the wealthy Leslies even.

Hilary looked resigned and weary. Why should Peter want to marry a commonplace and penniless little nobody, and not so very pretty either, though she looked nice and bright when she was animated, as now.

"Well," he said, "when is it to be?"

Peter looked across at Rhoda.

"I should hope very soon," he said. It was obviously safer, and safety was the object, to have it very soon.

"How soon can one get married? There have to be banns and so on, don't there? The third time of asking—that brings it to the eighteenth of December. What about the nineteenth, Rhoda? That's a Monday."

"Really, Peter ..." Rhoda blushed more than ever. "That seems awfully soon."

"Well," said Peter, blind to the unusualness of such a discussion at the dinner-table, "the sooner the better, don't you think? There's nothing to wait for. I don't suppose we shall ever have more money to do it on than we have now. I know of a man who waited years and years because he thought he hadn't got quite enough, and he got a little more each year, and at the end of six years he thought to double his fortune by putting it all on a winner, because he was getting so impatient. And the horse came in last. So the girl broke it off and married someone else, and the man's heart broke and he took to drink."

"Well?" enquired Miss Matthews, who thought Peter habitually irrelevant in his remarks.

"Well—so let's be married on December the nineteenth."

"I'm sure," said Rhoda, "we're quite embarrassing everybody, being so public. Let's settle it afterwards, Peter, when we're alone."

But she too meant to have it as soon as might be after the third time of asking; it was safer, much safer, so.

"Well," said Miss Clegson, as the ladies rose from the table, "now we're going to carry Miss Johnson away to tell us all about it; and we'll leave Mr. Peter to tell you gentlemen his secrets. And after that we'll have a good round game; but two of the present company can be left out if they like better to sit in the window-seat!"

But when the other gentlemen repaired to the drawing-room for the good round game, Peter stayed behind, with Hilary. He didn't want to talk or be talked to, only to stay where he was and not to have to sit in the window-seat.

"The insufferable vulgarity of this class of person on this subject is really the limit," Hilary remarked plaintively, as if it had jarred him beyond endurance.

"They're awfully kind, aren't they," said Peter, who looked tired. Then he laughed to himself. Hilary looked at him enquiringly.

"I suppose you know your own business, Peter. But I must confess I am surprised. I had literally no idea you had such a step in mind."

"I hadn't any idea either," Peter admitted frankly. "I thought of it quite suddenly. But I think it is a good plan, you know. Of course," he added, wording what he read in Hilary's face, "I know my life will cost me more. But I think it is worth while."

"It's quite entirely your own business," Hilary said again, throwing responsibility from him with a gesture of the hands. Then he leant back and shut his eyes.

Peter looked at him as he lay in the arm-chair and smoked; his eyes rested on the jaded, still beautiful face, the dark lock of hair falling a little over the tired forehead, the brown velvet smoking coat and large red silk tie. He knew that he had hurt and puzzled Hilary. And he knew that Hilary wouldn't understand if he were to explain what he couldn't ever explain. At the most he would say, "It is Peter all over," and shrug his shoulders at Peter and Peter's vagaries.

A great desire to smooth Hilary's difficult road, as far as might be, caught and held Peter. Poor old Hilary! He was so frightfully tired of life and its struggles; tired of being a Have-Not.

To help the other Have-Nots, to put pleasant things into their hands as far as might be, seemed to Peter at this moment the thing for which one existed. It is obviously the business of the Have-Nots to do that for one another; for the Haves do not know or understand. It is the Have-Nots who must give and give and give, with emptying hands; for from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

Peter went upstairs to the drawing-room to play animal grab.



CHAPTER XIV

PETER, RHODA, AND LUCY

When Mr. Vyvian called at 51 Brook Street one evening and was informed by the assembled company that Miss Johnson had got engaged to Mr. Peter Margerison, he sneered a little and wished them both joy, and said good-night rather markedly early.

"He won't come back," said Rhoda in Peter's ear when he had gone. "He's gone for good." She sat very still, realising it, and shivered a little. Then, casting off that old chain of the past, she turned on Peter eyes full of tears and affection.

"Now I'm going to forget all about him and be happy," she whispered. "He's not going to be part of my life any more at all. How queer that seems!"

If in her heart she wished a little that Peter had had Guy Vyvian's handsome face and person (Peter had no presence: one might overlook him; the only vivid note about him, except when he smiled, was the blue of his eyes), she stifled the wish with firm pressure. What were looks, after all? And that bold, handsome stare of Guy's had burnt and hurt; in the blue of Peter's she found healing and coolness, as one finds it in a summer sea.

So, after the third time of asking, they were married, in St. Austin's Church, and Rhoda, coming out of it, whispered to Peter, "Some of the beautiful things are true after all, I do believe;" and he smiled at her and said, "Of course they are."

They left the boarding-house, because Rhoda was tired of the boarders and wanted a little place to themselves. Peter, who didn't really care, but who would have rather liked to stay and be with Peggy and Hilary, pretended that he too wanted a little place to themselves. So they took lodgings in Greville Street, which runs out of Brook Street. Rhoda gave up her work and settled down to keep house and do needlework. They kept a canary in the sitting-room, and a kitten with a blue bow, and Rhoda took to wearing blue bows in her own hair, and sewed all the buttons on her frocks and darned her gloves and stockings and Peter's socks, and devoted herself to household economy, a subject in which her mother had always tried to interest her without success. Rhoda thought it a great relief to have escaped from the tiresome boarders who chattered so about things they knew nothing about, and from her own daily drudgery, that had tired her back. (She had been a typist.) It was nice to be able to sit at peace with one's needlework and one's own reflections, and have Peter, who was always kind and friendly and cheerful, to brighten breakfast and leave her in peace during the day and come in again to brighten the evening. Peter's chatter didn't worry her, though she often thought it childish and singularly inconsequent; Peter, of course, was only a boy, though such a dear, kind, affectionate boy. He would spend his evenings teasing the kitten and retying the blue bow, or lying on the rug before the fire, talking nonsense which made Rhoda laugh even when she was feeling low. Sometimes they would go to Brook Street and spend the evening there; and often Hilary would drop in and smoke with Peter; only Rhoda didn't much care for these evenings, for she never felt at ease with Hilary, who wasn't at ease with her either. The uncultured young creatures of either sex never quite knew where they were with the aesthetic Hilary; at any moment they might tread heavily on his sensitive susceptibilities and make him wince visibly, and no one likes being winced at. Rhoda in particular was very sensitive; she thought Hilary ill-mannered and conceited, and vaguely resented his attitude towards her without understanding it, for (now that she was removed from the crushing influence of a person who had always ruthlessly shown her her limitations and follies) she didn't think of herself as uncultured, she with her poetical and artistic tastes, sharpened and refined by contact with the culture of Guy Vyvian and broadened by acquaintance with the art of foreign cities. On the contrary, she felt in herself yearnings for a fuller and freer life of beauty and grace. She wasn't sure that Peter ever felt such yearnings; he seemed quite contented with the ugly rooms in the ugly street, and the dingy lace curtains and impossible pictures; he could make a joke of it all; and things one could make a joke of couldn't really hurt, thought Rhoda.

But anyhow, cramped and squalid and dingy though 9 Greville Street might be, it held security and peace.

"The Snuggery, that's what we call it at fifty-one," said Miss Clegson, who sometimes looked in to rally them.

Fifty-one was getting less of a snuggery than ever. Fifty-one, Peter feared, was going down the hill. The Berovieri goblet had made a little piece of level road for it, but that was soon over, and the descent began again. Peggy, try as she would, could not make both ends meet. Hilary, despise his job as he might, found it slipping from him more and more. Week by week he seemed to earn a little less; week by week they seemed to spend a little more. Peggy, as Hilary had frequently remarked, was not a good manager. One or two of the boarders left, to seek more commodious quarters elsewhere. More frequently, as the winter advanced, Peggy wailed, "Whatever is to become of us, dear only knows! What with Larry drinking pints of cough-syrup, and Micky rolling in the gutter in his best suit, and Norah, the creature, letting the crockery fly about as if it was alive, and Hilary insisting on the table cloth being cleaner than it ever is, and the boarders having to have food they can eat, and now Lent's coming on and half of them don't take any notice of it but eat their joints just the same, bad manners to them for heretics. Oh, dear, oh dear, oh dear!"

Whenever Peter could spare any money he gave it to Peggy. But his own fortunes were not exactly on the make. He was not proving good at his job. Recommended to his employers by Leslie, he had begun, of course, on a very small salary, to learn his trade; he hadn't so far learnt enough of it to justify his promotion. Every day he went through the same drudgery, with the same lack of intelligence,—(it is odd how discernment and talent in one trade serve so little for another)—and every week came home with the same meagre sum.

As far as he hated anything, he hated this work of his; long ago, had he been alone concerned, he would have dropped it, and taken to tramping the roads with boot-laces to sell, or some other equally unstrenuous and unlucrative avocation. But he had not, from the first, been alone concerned; first he had had to help Hilary and Peggy, and now he had to keep a wife too. Eventually there would probably be also children to keep; Peter didn't know how much these cost, but vaguely believed them to be expensive luxuries. So there seemed no prospect of his being able to renounce his trade, though there was a considerable prospect of its renouncing him, as he was from time to time informed.

The winter dragged quietly through, and the spring came; the queer London ghost of spring, with its bitter winds and black buds and evasive hints of what is going on in the real world, where things change. Peter dreamt of green things coming up and hawthorn hedges growing edible. Rhoda's cough grew softer and her eyes more restless, as if she too had her dreams. She developed a new petulance with Peter and with the maid-of-all-work, and left off tying the kitten's neck-ribbon. It was really a cat now, and cats are tiresome. She said she was dull all day with so little to do. Peter, full of compunction, suggested asking people to the house more, and she assented, rather listlessly. So Peter hinted to Peggy, who had a cheering presence, that Rhoda would be glad to see her more often, and Peggy made what time she could to come round. Their circle of friends was limited; they chiefly consisted of the inhabitants of fifty-one, and a few relatives of Rhoda's, who amused and pleased Peter but vexed Rhoda by being common.

"But I like them," said Peter.

"You like to see me put to shame, I suppose," said Rhoda, with tears in her eyes. "As if it was my fault that my parents came of common people. I've cried myself sick over it sometimes, when I was younger, and now I just want to forget it."

Peter said no more. It was one of the sides of Rhoda with which he felt he had no connexion; it was best let alone, as Peter always let alone the things he could not like. But he was sorry she felt like that, for her nice, common, friendly relations might have been company for her.

Peter sometimes brought friends home from his office; Peter could not have been in an office without collecting friends, having the social instinct strongly developed. But Rhoda didn't much care about seeing his fellow-clerks; they hadn't, she was sure, great minds, and they made silly jokes.

Another person who came to see Peter sometimes was Rodney. Ever since the Margerisons' abrupt fall into ignominy, Rodney had cultivated Peter's acquaintance. Peter perceived that he had at last slipped into the ranks of those unfortunates who were qualified for Rodney's regard; it was enough for that, Urquhart had long since told him, to be cut by society or to produce a yesterday's handkerchief. Peter, driven from the faces of the rich, found Rodney waiting to receive him cheerfully among the ranks of the poor. Rodney was a much occupied person; but when he found time from his other pursuits he walked up from his Westminster slum to Holborn and visited 9 Greville Street. He hadn't known quite what to make of Peter's marriage; though when he got to know Rhoda a little he began to understand rather more. She, being very manifestly among the Have-Nots, and a small, weak, and pitiable thing, also entered in a manner into the circle of his tolerance. He was gentle with her always, though not expansive. She was a little in awe of the gaunt young man, with his strange eyes that seemed to see so much further than anyone else's. She pronounced him "queer."

"I suppose he's very clever," she said to Peter.

"Yes," Peter agreed.

But even that didn't further him in Rhoda's regard. She thought him rude, as indeed he was, though he tried to conceal it. He seldom spoke to her, and when he did it was with an unadorned brevity that offended her. Mostly he let her alone, and saw Peter when he could outside his home. Rodney, himself a celibate, thought matrimony a mistake, though certainly a necessary mistake if the human race was to continue to adorn the earth—a doubtful ornament to it, in Rodney's opinion.

Rhoda said one evening to Peter, "You don't see anything of your friends the Urquharts now, do you?"

"No," said Peter, who was stroking the kitten's fur the wrong way, to bring sparks out of it before the gas was lit. "They've been in the country all the winter."

"Mr. Urquhart got elected a member, didn't he?" said Rhoda, without much interest.

"Yes," said Peter.

"I suppose they'll be coming up to town soon, then, for him to attend Parliament."

Peter supposed they would.

"When last Lucy wrote, she said they were coming up this month."

"Have you heard from her again, since Monday week?" enquired Rhoda.

"No. We write alternate Sundays, you know. We always have. Last Sunday it was my turn."

"Fancy going on all these years so regular," said Rhoda. "I couldn't, not to any of my cousins. I should use up all there was to say."

"Oh, but there are quite new things every fortnight," Peter explained.

Certainly it wasn't easy to picture Rhoda corresponding with any of the Johnson relatives once a fortnight.

"I expect you and she have heaps to tell each other always when you meet," said Rhoda, a little plaintive note in her weak voice.

Peter considered.

"Not so much to tell exactly as to talk about. Yes, there's lots to say.... She's coming to see you, Rhoda, directly they come up to town. It's so funny to think you and she have never met."

"Is it? Well, I don't know. I've not met any of your cousins really, have I?"

Rhoda was in one of her slightly pettish moods this evening. Peter didn't better matters by saying, "Oh, well, none of the others count. Lucy and I have always been different from most cousins, I suppose; more like brother and sister, I daresay."

Rhoda looked at him sharply. She was in a fault-finding mood.

"You think more of her than you do of anyone else. Of course, I know that."

Peter was startled. He stopped stroking the kitten and looked at her through the dim firelight. The suspicion of a vulgar scene was in the air, and frightened him. Then he remembered that Rhoda was in frail health, and said very gently, "Oh, Rhoda darling, don't say silly things, like a young gurl in a novelette," and slithered along the floor and laid his arm across her lap and laughed up into her face.

She sniffed a little, and dabbed her handkerchief at her eyes.

"It's all very well, Peter, but you do care for her a lot, you know you do."

"But of course I do," said Peter, laying his cheek against her knee. "You don't mind, Rhoda, do you?"

"You care for her," said Rhoda, but softening under his caresses, "and you care for her husband. You care for him awfully, Peter; more than for her really, I believe; more than for anyone in the world, don't you?"

"Don't," said Peter, his voice muffled against her dress. "I can't compare one thing with another like that, and I don't want to. Isn't one's caring for each of the people one knows quite different from every other? Isn't yours? Can you say which you love best, the sun rising over the river, or St. Mark's, or a Bellini Madonna? Of course you can't, and it's immoral to try. So I'm not going to place Lucy and Denis and you and Rodney and Peggy and the kitten in a horrid class-list. I won't. Do you hear?"

He drew one of her small thin hands down to his lips, then moved it up and placed it on his head, and drew it gently to and fro, ruffling his hair.

"You're a silly, Peter," said Rhoda, and there was peace.

Very soon after that Lucy came. She came in the afternoon before Peter got home, and Rhoda looked with listless interest at the small, wide-eyed person in a grey frock and big grey hat that made her small, pale face look like a white flower. Pretty? Rhoda wasn't sure. Very like Peter; so perhaps not pretty; only one liked to look at her. Clever? It didn't transpire that she was. Witty? Well, much more amused than amusing; and when she was amused she came out with Peter's laugh, which Rhoda wasn't sure was in good taste on her part. Absurdly like Peter she was, to look at and to listen to, and in some inner essence which was beyond definition. The thought flashed through Rhoda's mind that it was no wonder these two found things to tell each other every other Sunday; they would be interested in all the same things, so it must be easy.

Remotely, dully, Rhoda thought these things, as things which didn't concern her particularly. Less and less each day she had grown to care whether Peter found his cousin Lucy a kindred spirit or not. She could work herself up into a fit of petulant jealousy about it at times; but it didn't touch her inmost being; it was a very surface grievance.

So she looked at Lucy dispassionately, and let herself, without a struggle, be caught and held by that ingenuous charm, a charm as of a small woodland flower set dancing by the winds of spring. She noticed that when the kitten that was now nearly a cat sprang on to Lucy's lap, she stroked its fur backwards with her flat hand and spread fingers precisely as Peter always did.

Then Peter came in, and he and Lucy laughed the same laugh at one another, and then they had tea. After all, Rhoda didn't see now that they were so like. Peter talked much more; he said twenty words to Lucy's one; Lucy wasn't a great talker at all. Peter was a chatterbox; there was no denying that. And their features and eyes and all weren't so like, either. But when one had said all this, there was something... something inner, essential, indefinable, of the spirit, that was not of like substance but the same. So it is sometimes with twins. Rhoda, her intuitive faculties oddly sharpened, took in this. Peter might care most for Denis Urquhart; he might love Rhoda as a wife; but Lucy, less consciously loved than either, was intimately one with himself.

Peter asked "How is Denis?" and Lucy answered "Very well, of course. And very busy playing at being a real member. Isn't it fun? Oh, he sent you his love. And you're to come and see us soon."

That last wasn't a message from Denis; Peter knew that. He knew that there would be no more such messages from Denis; the Margerisons had gone a little too far in their latest enterprise; they had strained the cord to breaking-point, and it had broken. In future Denis might be kind and friendly to Peter when they met, but he wouldn't bring about meetings; they would embarrass him. But Lucy knew nothing of that. Denis hadn't mentioned to her what had happened at Astleys last November; he never dwelt on unpleasant subjects or made a talk about them. So Lucy said to Peter and Rhoda, "You must come and see us soon," and Peter said, "You're so far away, you know," evading her, and she gave him a sudden wide clear look, taking in all he didn't say, which was the way they had with one another, so that no deceits could ever stand between them.

"Don't be silly, Peter," she told him; then, "'Course you must come"; but he only smiled at her and said, "Some day, perhaps."

"Honey sandwiches, if you come at tea-time," she reminded him. "D'you like them, Rhoda?" She used the name prettily, half shyly, with one of her luminous, friendly looks. "They're Peter's favourite food, you know."

But Rhoda didn't know; Peter had never told her; perhaps because it would be extravagant to have them, perhaps because he never put even foods into class-lists. Only Lucy knew without being told, probably because it was her favourite food too.

When Lucy went, it was as if a ray of early spring sunshine had stolen into the room and gone. A luminous person: that was the thing Rhoda felt her to be; a study in clear pale lights; one would not have been surprised if she had crept in on a wind from a strange fairy world with her arms full of cold wet primroses, and danced out, taking with her the souls of those who dwelt within. Rhoda wasn't jealous now, if she had ever had a touch of that.

Neither Peter nor Rhoda went to the Urquharts' house, which was a long way off. But Lucy came again, many times, to Greville Street, through that spring and summer, stroking the cat's fur backwards, laughing at Peter, shyly friendly to Rhoda.

And then for a time her laughter was sad and her eyes wistful, because her father died. She said once, "I feel so stranded now, Peter; cut off from what was my life; from what really is my life, you know. Father and Felicity and I were so disreputable always, and as long as I had father I could be disreputable too, whenever I felt I couldn't bear being prosperous. I had only to go inside the house and there I was—you know, Peter?—it was all round me, and I was part of it.... Now I'm cut off from all that sort of thing. Denis and I are so well off, d'you know. Everything goes right. Denis's friends are all so happy and successful and beautifully dressed. I like them to be, of course; they are joys, like the sun shining; only..."

"The poor are always with you," suggested Peter. "You can always come to Greville Street, if you can't find them nearer at hand. And when you come we'll take Algernon's blue neck-ribbon off, that none of us may appear beautifully dressed."

"But I like Algernon's blue bow," Lucy protested. "I love people to be bright and beautiful.... That's why I like Denis so much, you know. Only I'm not sure I properly belong, that's all."

Obviously the remedy was to come to Greville Street. Lucy came more and more as the months went by.

Rhoda said once, "Doesn't it bother you to come all this way, into these ugly streets?" and she shook her head.

"Oh, I like it. I like these streets better than the ones round us. And I like your house better than ours too; it's smaller."

Rhoda could have thought she looked wistful, this fortunate person who was in love with her splendid husband and lived in the dwellings of the prosperous.

"Don't you like large houses?" she asked, without much caring; for she was absorbed in her own thoughts in these days.

Lucy puckered her wide forehead.

"Why, no. No, I don't believe I do," she said, as if she was finding it out with a little surprise.

Rhoda saw her one day in July. In a few weeks, she told Rhoda (Peter was out that afternoon), she and Denis were going up to Scotland, to stay with people.

"We shall miss you," said Rhoda dully.

"And me you," said Lucy, with a more acute sense of it.

"Peter'll miss you dreadfully," said Rhoda. She was lying on the sofa, pale and tired in the heat.

"Only," said Lucy, "next month you'll both be feeling too interested to miss anyone."

"Peter," said Rhoda, "cares more about the baby coming than I do."

Lucy said, "Peter loves little weak funny things like that." She was a little sad that Rhoda didn't seem to care more about the baby; babies are such entrancing toys to those who like toys, people like her and Peter.

Suddenly Lucy saw that two large tears were rolling down Rhoda's pale cheeks as she lay. Lucy knelt by the sofa side and took Rhoda's hand in both of hers and laid her cheek upon it.

"Please, little Rhoda, not to cry. Please, little Rhoda, tell me."

Rhoda, with her other hand, brushed the tears away.

"I'm a silly. I suppose I'm crying because I can't feel to care about anything in the world, and I wish I could. What's the use of a baby if you can't love it? What's the use of a husb—"

Lucy's hand was over her lips, and Lucy whispered, "Oh, hush, little Rhoda, hush!"

But Rhoda pushed the hand away and cried, "Oh, why do we pretend and pretend and pretend? It's Guy I care for—Guy, Guy, Guy, who's gone for good and all."

She fell to crying drearily, with Lucy's arms about her.

"But you mustn't cry," said Lucy, her own eyes brimming over; "you mustn't, you mustn't. And you do care for Peter, you know you do, only it's so hot, and you're tired and ill. If that horrible Guy was here—oh, I know he's horrible—you'd know you cared for Peter most. You mustn't say things, Rhoda; it makes them alive." Her eyes were wide and frightened as she looked over Rhoda's head out of the window.

Slowly Rhoda quieted down, and lay numb and still.

"You won't tell Peter," she said; and Lucy said, "Oh, Rhoda!"

"Well, of course I know you wouldn't. Only that you and Peter tell one another things without saying anything.... Peter belongs to you really, you know, not to me at all. All he thinks and says and is—it's all yours. He's never really been near me like that, not from the beginning. I was a silly to let him sacrifice himself for me the way he's done. We don't belong really, Peter and I; however friendly we are, we don't belong; we don't understand each other like you two do.... You don't mind my saying that, do you?" for Lucy had dropped her hands and fallen away.

"I mind your saying anything," said Lucy, "just now. Don't say things: it makes them alive. It's hot, and you're tired, and I'm not going to stay any more."

She got up from the floor and stood for a moment looking down at Rhoda. Rhoda saw her eyes, how they were wet and strange and far-away, and full of what seemed an immense weight of pity; pity for all the sadnesses of mankind.

The next moment Lucy's cool finger-tips touched her forehead in a light caress, and Lucy was gone.



CHAPTER XV

THE LOSS OF A WIFE

In September Peter and Rhoda had a son, whom they called Thomas, because, Peter said, he had a sceptical look about the eyes and nose. Peter was pleased with him, and he with Peter. Rhoda wasn't much interested; she looked at him and said he was rather like Peter, and might be taken away now, please.

"Like me?" Peter wondered dubiously. "Well, I know I'm not handsome, but..."

Peggy, a born mother, took Thomas into her large heart at once, with her out-at-elbows infants, and was angry with Rhoda for not showing more interest.

"You'd think, from the way of her, that it was her thirteenth instead of her first," she complained to Hilary. "I've no patience with the silly, mooning child. She's nothing like good enough for Peter, and that's a fact, and she'd have a right to realise it and try to improve for very shame, instead of moping the way she does. It's my belief, Hilary, that her silly little heart's away after the Vyvian man, whatever haunt of wickedness he's adorning now. I don't want to believe it of her; but there's no end to the folly of the human heart, is there, now? I wish she was a Catholic and had a priest to make her take shame to herself; but there's no hold one has over her as it is, for she won't say a word to me beyond 'Yes' and 'No,' and 'Take him away, please, he tires me.' I nearly told her she'd a right not to be so easily tired by her own son now she's getting her health. But there, she's a poor frail thing and one can't speak roughly to her for fear she breaks in two."

Hilary said, "After all, there's no great cause for rejoicing in a man's being born into the world to trouble; I suppose she feels that. It will make it more difficult than ever for them and for us to make both ends meet."

"Oh, meet," groaned Peggy, "that's not what there's any thought of their doing in these days, my dear. If one can bring them within a mile of one another, one's thankful for small mercies."

Hilary rested his head on his hand and sighed.

"Have you spoken to Peter yet about appealing to the Urquharts?" he asked.

"Darling, I have not, and I'm not going to. Why should I annoy the poor child to no purpose? He'll not appeal to the Urquharts, we know that well, and I'm not going to waste my breath. I'd far rather—"

"What?" asked Hilary, as she paused.

"Oh well, I don't know. Don't you worry about ways and means; something will surely turn up before long." Peggy was an optimist.

"And anyhow," went on Peggy, to change the subject from ways and means, which was a depressing one, "isn't our little Peter a darling with his baby? I love to see them together. He washes it himself as often as not, you know; only he can't always catch it again when it slips through his hands, and that worries him. He's dreadfully afraid of its getting drowned or spoilt or lost or something."

"It probably will," said Hilary, who was a pessimist. "Peter is no hand at keeping things. We are not a fortunate family."

"Never mind, darling; we've kept three; and more by token Kitty must have a new pair of boots this winter; she's positively indecent the way she goes about now. I can't help it, Hilary; you must pawn your ring again or something."

Peggy didn't want to say anything else depressing, so she didn't mention that Miss Matthews had that morning given notice of her departure. But in Peggy's own mind there was a growing realisation that something drastic must really be done soon.

October went by. When Peter knew that the Urquharts had come back to London, he wondered why Lucy didn't come to see Thomas. So he wrote and asked her to, and on that she came.

She came at tea-time, one day when Rhoda happened to have gone out. So Peter and Lucy had tea alone together, and Thomas lay in his crib and looked at them, and Algernon snored on Lucy's knee, and the November fog shut out the outer world like a blanket, and blurred the gas-light in the dingy room.

Peter thought Lucy was rather quiet and pale, and her chuckle was a little subdued. Her dominant aspect, of clear luminousness, was somehow dimmed and mystified, with all other lights, in this blurred afternoon. Her wide clear eyes, strange always with the world's gay wonder and mystery, had become eyes less gay, eyes that did not understand, that even shrank a little from what they could not understand. Lucy looked a touch puzzled, not so utterly the glad welcomer of all arriving things that she had always been.

But for Thomas, the latest arrived thing, she had a glad welcome. Like Peter, she loved all little funny weak things; and Thomas seemed certainly that, as he lay and blinked at the blurred gas and curled his fingers round one of Peter's. A happy, silent person, with doubts, one fancied, as to the object of the universe, but no doubts that there were to be found in it many desirable things.

When Lucy came in, Peter was reading aloud to him some of Traherne's "Divine Reflections on the Native Objects of an Infant-Eye," which he seemed rather to like.

"I that so long [Peter told him he was thinking, Was Nothing from Eternity, Did little think such Joys as Ear and Tongue To celebrate or see: Such Sounds to hear, such Hands to feel, such Feet, Such Eyes and Objects on the Ground to Meet.

"New burnisht Joys! Which finest Gold and Pearl excell!"

"Oo," said Thomas expectantly.

"A Stranger here, [Peter told him further, Strange things doth meet, strange Glory see; Strange Treasures lodg'd in this fair World appear, Strange all and New to me: But that they mine should be who Nothing was, That strangest is of all; yet brought to pass."

"Ow," said Thomas, agreeing.

Peter turned over the pages. "Do you like it? Do you think so too? Here's another about you."

"But little did the Infant dream That all the Treasures of the World were by, And that himself was so the Cream And Crown of all which round about did ly. Yet thus it was!..."

"I don't think you'd understand the rest of that verse, Thomas; it's rather more difficult. 'Yet thus it was!' We'll end there, and have our tea."

Turning his head he saw that Lucy had come in and was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder at Thomas in his crib.

"Oh, Lucy," he said, "I'm reading to Thomas. Thomas is that. Do you like him? He is surprised at life, but quite pleased. He that was Nothing from Eternity did little think such Joys to celebrate or see. Yet thus it is. He is extraordinarily happy about it all, but he can't do anything yet, you know—not speak or sit up or anything. He can only make noises, and cry, and drink, and slither about in his bath like a piece of wet soap. Wasn't there a clergyman once who thought his baby ought to be baptised by immersion unless it was proved not well able to endure it, as it says in the rubric or somewhere, so he put it in a tub to try if it could endure it or not, and he let it loose by accident and couldn't catch it again, it was so slippery, just like a horrid little fish, and its mother only came in and got hold of it just in time to prevent its being drowned? So after that he felt he could honestly certify that the child couldn't well endure immersion. I'm getting better at catching Thomas, though. He isn't supposed to slip off my hand at all, but he kicks and slithers so I can't hold him, and swims away and gets lost. After tea will you come and help me wash him? Rhoda's out to tea; I'm so sorry. But there's tea, and Thomas and Algernon and me, and—and rather thick bread and butter only, apparently; but I shall have jam now you've come. First I must adjust Thomas's drinking-bottle; he always likes a drink while we have our tea. He's two months old. Is he good for that, do you think, or should he be a size larger? But I rather like them small, don't you? They're lighter so, for one thing. Is he nice? Do you like him?"

Lucy, kneeling by the crib, nodded.

"He's very old and wise, Peter; very old and gay. Look at his eyes. He's much—oh very much—older than you or me. That's as it should be."

"He'll rejuvenate with years, won't he?" said Peter. "At present he's too old to laugh when I make jokes; he thinks them silly; but he'll be sillier than anyone himself in about six months, I expect. Now we'll have tea."

Lucy left Thomas and came to the tea-table and poured out tea for both of them.

"I'm trying to learn to do without three lumps," said Peter, as Lucy put them in. "I expect it's extravagant to have three, really. But then Rhoda and Thomas don't take any, so it's only the same as if we each had one, isn't it. Thomas shan't be allowed more than one in each cup when he grows young enough to want any; Rhoda and I mean him to be a refined person."

"I don't think he will be," said Lucy, looking thoughtfully into the future. "I expect he'll be as vulgar as you and me. He's awfully like you to look at, Peter."

"So I am informed. Well, I'm not vain, and I don't claim to be an Adonis, like Denis. Is Denis flourishing? The birds were splendid; they came so thick and fast that I gathered it was being a remarkable season. But as you only answered my numerous letters by one, and that apropos merely of Thomas's arrival, I could only surmise and speculate on your doings. I suppose you thought the grouse were instead of letters."

"They were Denis's letters. I didn't shoot the grouse, dear darlings, nor send them."

"What were your letters, then?"

"Well, I sent rowan berries, didn't I? Weren't they red?"

"Yes. Even Thomas read them. We're being rather funny, aren't we? Is Denis going on with Parliament again this autumn, or has he begun to get tired of it?"

"Not a bit tired of it. He doesn't bother about it particularly, you know; not enough to tire himself; he sort of takes it for granted, like going up to Scotland in August."

Peter nodded. "I know. He would take it just like that if he was Prime Minister, or Archbishop of Canterbury. I daresay he will be one day; isn't it nice the way things drop into his hands without his bothering to get them."

He didn't see the queer, silent look Lucy turned on him as he spread his thick bread and butter with blackberry jam.

"Thomas," she said after a moment, "has dropped into your hands, Peter." It was as if she was protesting against something, beating herself against some invisible, eternal barrier that divided the world into two unequal parts.

Peter said, "Rather, he has. I do hope he'll never drop out. I'm getting very handy about holding him, though. Oh, let's take him upstairs and tub him now; do you mind?"

So they took him upstairs and tubbed him, and Lucy managed to hold him so firmly that he didn't once swim away and get lost.

As they were drying him (Lucy dried him with a firmer and more effective hand than Peter, who always wiped him very gingerly lest he should squash) Rhoda came in. She was strange-eyed and pale in the blurred light, and greeted Lucy in a dreamy, absent way.

"I've had tea out.... Oh, have you bathed baby? How good of you. I meant to be in earlier, but I was late.... The fog's awful; it's getting thicker and thicker."

She sat down by the fire and loosened her coat, and took off her hat and rubbed the fog from her wet hair, and coughed. Rhoda had grown prettier lately; she looked less tired and listless, and her eyes were brighter, and the fire flushed her thin cheek to rose-colour as she bent over it.

Peter took her wet things from her and took off her shoes and put slippers on her feet, and she gave him an absent smile. Rhoda had had a dreamy way with her since Thomas's birth; moony, as Peggy, who didn't approve, called it.

A little later, when Thomas was clean and warm and asleep in his bed, they were told that Mrs. Urquhart's carriage had come.

Lucy bent over Thomas and kissed him, then over Rhoda. Rhoda whispered in her ear, without emotion, "Baby ought to have been yours, not mine," and Lucy whispered back:

"Oh hush, hush!"

Rhoda still held her, still whispered, "Will you love him? Will you be good to him, always?"

And Lucy answered, opening wide eyes, "Why, of course. No one could help it, could they?" and on that Rhoda let her go.

Peter thought that Lucy must have infected Rhoda with some of her own appreciation of Thomas, opened her eyes to his true worth; for during the next week she was newly tender to him. She bathed him every evening herself, only letting Peter help a little; she held him in her arms without wearying of his weight, and wasn't really annoyed even when he was sick upon her shoulder, an unfortunate habit of Thomas's.

But a habit, Peter thought, that Thomas employed with some discrimination; for the one and only one time that Guy Vyvian took him in his arms—or rather submitted to his being put there by Rhoda—Thomas was sicker than he had ever been before, with an immense completeness.

"Just what I always feel myself," commented Peter in his own mind, as Thomas was hastily removed. "I'm glad someone has shown him at last what the best people feel about him."

Vyvian had come to call. It was the first time Peter had met him since his marriage; he hoped it would be the last. The object of the call was to inspect Thomas, Rhoda said. Thomas was inspected, produced the impression indicated above, and was relegated to the region of things for which Vyvian had no use. He detested infants; children of any sort, in fact; and particularly Thomas, who had Peter's physiognomy and expressed Peter's sentiments in a violently ill-bred way.

Peter, a little later, was very glad that Thomas had revealed himself thus openly on this occasion. For it quite sealed Thomas's fate, if anything more was needed to seal it than the fact that Thomas would be an impossible burden, and also belonged by right to Peter. Anyhow, they left Thomas behind them when they went.

Rhoda wrote a scrawled note for Peter one foggy Monday morning, and hugged Thomas close and cried a little, and slipped out into the misty city with a handbag. Peter, coming in at tea-time, found the note on the sitting-room chimney-piece. It said:—

"Don't try to follow me, Peter, for I can't come back. I have tried to care for you more than him and be a good wife, but I can't. You know I told you when we got engaged that I cared for him, and I tried so hard to stop, and I thought I would be able, with you to help me, but I couldn't do it. For the first few months I thought I could, but all the time it was there, like a fire in me, eating me up; and later on he began writing to me, but for a long time I wouldn't answer, and then he came to see me, and I said he mustn't, but he's been meeting me out and I couldn't stop him, and at last it grew that I knew I loved him so that it was no use pretending any more. I'd better go, Peter, for what's the use of trying to be a good wife to you when all I care for is him. I know he's not good, and you are, but I love him, and I must go when he wants me. It was all a mistake; you and I ought never to have married. You meant it kindly, I know; you meant to help me and make me happy, but it was no use. You and I never properly belonged. When I saw you and Lucy together, I knew we didn't belong, not like that; we didn't properly understand each other's ways and thoughts, like you two did. I love Lucy, too. You and she are so like. And she'll be good to Baby; she said she would. I hate to leave Baby, but Guy won't let me bring him, and anyhow I suppose I couldn't, because he's yours. I've written a list of his feeds, and it's on the chimney-piece behind the clock; please make whoever sees to him go by it or he gets a pain. Please be careful when you bath him; I think Mrs. Adams had better do it usually. She'll take care of him for you, or Peggy will, perhaps. You'll think I never cared for him, but I do, I love him, only I must love Guy most of all. I don't know if I shall be happy or miserable, but I expect miserable, only I must go with Guy. Please, dear Peter, try and understand this, and forgive me. I think you will, because you always do understand things, and forgive them too; I think you are the kindest person I ever knew. If I thought you loved me really, I don't think I'd go, even for Guy; but I know you've only felt kindly to me all along, so I think it is best for you too that I should go, and you will be thankful in the end. Good-bye. You promised mother to see after me, I know, for she told me before she died; well, you've done your best, and mother'd be grateful to you if she could know. I suppose some would say she does know, perhaps; but I don't believe those stories; I believe it's all darkness beyond, and silence. And if it is, we must try and get all the light and warmth here that we can. So I'm going.

"Good-bye, Peter.

"Rhoda."

Peter read it through, sitting on the rug by the fire. When he had finished it, he put it into the fire and watched it burn. Then he sighed, and sat very still for a while, his hands clasped round one knee.

Presently he got up and looked behind the clock, and saw that the next feeding-time was due now. So he rang for Mrs. Adams, the landlady, and asked her if she would mind bringing Thomas's bottle.

When Thomas had it, Peter stood and looked down upon him as he drank with ill-bred noises.

"Gently, Thomas: you'll choke. You'll choke and die, I know you will. Then you'll be gone too. Everything goes, Thomas. Everything I touch breaks; everything I try to do fails. That's because I'm such an ass, I suppose. I did think I could perhaps make one little unlucky girl decently happy; but I couldn't, you see. So she's gone after light and warmth, and she'll—she'll break her heart in a year, and it'll be my fault. Follow her? No, I shan't do that. I shouldn't find her, and if I did what would be the use? If she must go, she must; she was only eating her heart out here; and perhaps it's better to break one's heart on something than eat it out in emptiness. No, it isn't better in this case. Anything in the world would have been better than this; that she should have gone with that—that person. Yet thus it is. And they'll all set on her and speak against her, and I shall have to bear it. You and I will have to bear it together, Thomas.... I suppose I ought to be angry. I ought to want to go after them, to the end of the world or wherever they've gone and kill him and bring her back. But I can't. I should fail in that too. I'm tired of trying to do things; simply horribly tired of it, Thomas." He sat down on the rug with Thomas in his arms; and there, an hour later, Peggy found them. She swung in breezily, crying, "Oh, Peter, all alone in the dark? Where's Rhoda? Why, the silly children haven't had their tea!" she added, looking at the unused cups on the tea-table.

Peter looked up vaguely. "Oh, tea. I forgot. I don't think I want any tea to-day. And Thomas has had his. And Rhoda's gone. It's no good not telling you—is it?—because you'll find out. She's gone away. It's been my fault entirely; I didn't make her happy, you see. And she's written out a list of the times Thomas has to feed at. I suppose Mrs. Adams will do that if I ask her, and generally look after him when I'm out."

Peggy stood aghast before him for a moment, staring, then collapsed, breathless, on the sofa, crying, with even more r's than usual.

"Peter!... Why, she's gone and rrun off with that toad, that rreptile man! Oh, I know it, so it's not a bit of use your trying to keep it from me."

"Very well," said Peter; "I suppose it's not."

"Oh, the little fool, the little, silly, wicked fool! But if ever a little fool got her rich deserts without needing to wait for purgatory, that one'll be Rhoda.... Oh, Peter, be more excited and angry! Why aren't you stamping up and down and vowing vengeance, instead of sitting on the hearth saying, 'Rhoda's gone,' as if it was the kitten?"

"I'm sorry, Peggy." Peter sighed a little. "I'm nursing Thomas, you see."

Peggy at that was on her knees on the floor, taking both of them into her large embrace.

"Oh, you two poor little darling boys, what's to become of you both? That child has a heart of stone, to leave you to yourselves the way she's done. Don't defend her, Peter; I won't hear a word said for her again as long as I live; she deserves Guy Vyvian, and I couldn't say a worse word for her than that. You poor little Tommy; come to me then, babykins. You must come back to us now, Peter, and I'll look after you both."

She cuddled Thomas to her breast with one arm, and put the other round Peter's shoulders as he sat huddled up, his chin resting on his knees. At the moment it was difficult to say which of the two looked the most forsaken, the most left to himself. Only Thomas hadn't yet learnt to laugh, and Peter had. He laughed now, softly and not happily.

"It has been rather a ghastly fiasco, hasn't it," he said. "Absurd, you know, too, in a way. I thought it was all working out so nicely, Thomas coming and everything. But no. It wasn't working out nicely at all. Things don't as a rule, do they?"

There was a new note of dreariness in his voice; a note that had perhaps been kept out of it of set purpose for a long time. Now there seemed at the moment no particular reason to keep it out any more, though fresh reasons would arrive, no doubt, very soon; and Thomas when waking was a reason in himself. But in this dim hour between two roads, this hour of relaxation of tension in the shadowy firelight, when Thomas slept and only Peggy listened, Peter, having fallen crashing through floor after floor of his pleasant house of life, till he was nearly at the bottom, looked up at all the broken floors and sighed.

Peggy's arm was comfortingly about him. To her he was always a little, brittle, unlucky boy, as she had first seen him long ago.

"Never you mind, Peterkin. There's a good time coming, I do believe. She'll come back, perhaps; who knows? Vyvian wouldn't do for long, not even for Rhoda. Besides, you may be sure he'll throw her off soon, and then she'll want to come back to you and Tommy. I wouldn't say that to any other man, because, of course, no other man would have her back; but I do believe, Peterkin, that you would, wouldn't you now? I expect you'd smile and say, 'Oh, come in, you're just in time for tea and to see me bath Thomas,' and not another word about it."

"Probably," said Peter. "There wouldn't be much to say, would there? But she won't come back; I know that. Even if she leaves him she won't. Rhoda's horribly proud really, you know. She'd sooner sweep a crossing, or trim hats or something, than come near us again. I don't know what to hope about it. I suppose one must hope they'll go on together, as Rhoda seems to like him as he is; but it's an awful thought.... She's right that we never understood each other. I couldn't, you know, bear to think of spending even one day alone with Vyvian. I should be sick, like Thomas. The mere sight of his hair is enough, and his hand with that awful ring on it. I—I simply draw the line at him. Why does Rhoda care for him? How can she?" Peter frowned over it in bewilderment.

Peggy said, "Girls are silly things. And I suppose the way one's been brought up counts, and what one's inherited, and all that."

"Well, if Rhoda'd taken after Mrs. Johnson she wouldn't have liked Vyvian. He used to give her the creeps, like a toad. She told me so. She disliked him more than I did.... Well, I shall never understand. I suppose if I could Rhoda would have found me more sympathetic, and might have stayed."

"Now, darling, you're not to sit up and brood any more; that won't help. You're coming straight back with me to dinner, and Tommy's coming too, to sleep. I shall ask Mrs. Adams to help me get his things together."

"He hasn't many things," said Peter, looking vaguely round for them. "I got him a rattle and a ball, but he doesn't seem to care about them much; Lucy says he's not young enough yet. Here's his bottle. And his night clothes are upstairs, and his other day clothes, and his bath. Thomas leads the simple life, though; he really possesses very little; I think he's probably going to be a Franciscan later on. But he can sleep with me here all right; I should like to have him; only it would be awfully good of you if you'd have him to-morrow, while I'm out at work. But in the night he and I rather like each other's company."

"Rubbish," said Peggy. "You're both coming along to fifty-one this minute. You don't suppose I'm going to leave you two infants alone together like that. We've heaps of room at fifty-one"—she sighed a little—"people have been fading away like the flowers of the forest, and we should be thankful to have you back."

"Oh, we'll come then; thanks very much, Peggy." Peter's ready sympathy was turned on again, having temporarily been available only for himself and Rhoda and Thomas. He remembered now that Peggy and Hilary needed it too. He and Thomas would go and be boarders in the emptying boarding-house; it might amuse Thomas, perhaps, to see the other boarders.

"And we'll have him baptized," went on Peggy, thinking of further diversions for Thomas and Peter. "You'll let him be a Catholic, Peter, won't you?"

"Thomas," said Peter, "can be anything he likes that's nice. As long as he's not a bigot. I won't have him refusing to go into one sort of church because he prefers another; he mustn't ever acquire the rejecting habit. Short of that, he may enter any denomination or denominations he prefers."

They were collecting Thomas's belongings as they talked. Thomas lay and looked at them with the very blue slits that were like his father's eyes grown old. And suddenly Peggy, looking from son to father, saw that Peter's eyes had grown as old as Thomas's, looking wearily out of a pale, pinched face.

Peggy's own eyes brimmed over as she bent over Thomas's night-shirt.



CHAPTER XVI

A LONG WAY

Lord Evelyn Urquhart dined with his nephew on the last evening in February. It was a characteristic Urquhart dinner-party; the guests were mostly cheerful, well-bred young people of high spirits and of the worldly station that is not much concerned with any aspect of money but the spending of it. High living, plain thinking, agreeable manners and personal appearance, plenty of humour, enough ability to make a success of the business of living and not enough to agitate the brain, a light tread along a familiar and well-laid road, and a serene blindness to side-tracks and alleys not familiar nor well-laid and to those that walked thereon—these were the characteristics of the pleasant people who frequented Denis Urquhart's pleasant house in Park Lane.

Lucy was among them, small and pale, and rather silent, and intensely alive. She, of course, was a native not of Park Lane but of Chelsea; and the people who had frequented her home there were of a different sort. They had had, mostly, a different kind of brain, a kind more restless and troublesome and untidy, and a different type of wit, more pungent and ironic, less well-fed and hilarious, and they were less well-dressed and agreeable to look at, and had (perhaps) higher thoughts (though how shall one measure height?) and ate (certainly) plainer food, for lack of richer. These were the people Lucy knew. Her father himself had been of these. She now found her tent pitched among the prosperous; and the study of them touched her wide gaze with a new, pondering look. Denis hadn't any use for cranks. None of his set were socialists, vegetarians, Quakers, geniuses, anarchists, drunkards, poets, anti-breakfasters, or anti-hatters; none of them, in fine, the sort of person Lucy was used to. They never pawned their watches or walked down Bond Street in Norfolk coats. They had, no doubt, their hobbies; but they were suitable, well-bred hobbies, that did not obtrude vulgarly on other people's notice. Peter had once said that if he were a plutocrat he would begin to dream dreams. Lucy supposed that the seemingly undreaming people who were Denis's friends were not rich enough; they hadn't reached plutocracy, where romance resides, but merely prosperity, which has fewer possibilities. Lucy began in these days to ponder on the exceeding evil of Socialism, which the devil has put it into certain men's hearts to desire. For, thought Lucy, sweep away the romantic rich, sweep away the dreaming destitute, and what have you left? The prosperous; the comfortable; the serenely satisfied; the sanely reasonable. Dives, with his purple and fine linen, his sublime outlook over a world he may possess at a touch, goes to his own place; Lazarus, with his wallet for crusts and his place among the dogs and his sharp wonder at the world's black heart, is gathered to his fathers: there remain the sanitary dwellings of the comfortable, the monotonous external adequacy that touches no man's inner needs, the lifeless rigour of a superintended well-being. Decidedly, thought Lucy, siding with the Holy Roman Church, a scheme of the devil's. Denis and his friends also thought it was rot. So no doubt it was. Denis belonged to the Conservative party. Lucy thought parties funny things, and laughed. Though she had of late taken to wandering far into seas of thought, so that her wide forehead was often puckered as she sat silent, she still laughed at the world. Perhaps the more one thinks about it the more one laughs; the height and depth of its humour are certainly unfathomable.

On this last night of February, Lord Evelyn, when the other guests had gone, put his unsteady white hand under Lucy's chin and raised her small pale face and looked at it out of his near-sighted, scrutinising eyes, and said:

"Humph. You're thinner."

Lucy's eyes laughed up at him.

"Am I? I suppose I'm growing old."

"You're worrying. What's it about?" asked Lord Evelyn.

They were in the library. Lord Evelyn and Denis sat by the fire in leather chairs and smoked, and Lucy sat on a hassock between them, her chin in her hands.

She was silent for a moment. Then she looked up at Denis, who was reading Punch, and said, "I've had a letter from Peggy Margerison this morning."

Denis gave a sound between a grunt and a chuckle. The grunt element was presumably for Peggy Margerison, the chuckle for Punch.

Lord Evelyn, tapping his eye-glass on the arm of his chair, said, "Well? Well?" impatiently, nervously.

Lucy drew a note from her pocket (she was never pocketless) and spread it on her knees. It was a long letter on crinkly paper, written in a large, dashing, sprawling hand, full of curls, generosities, extravagances.

"She says," said Lucy, "(Please listen, Denis,) that—that they want money."

"I somehow thought that would be what she said," Denis murmured, still half preoccupied. "I'm sure she's right."

"A woman who writes a hand like that," put in Lord Evelyn, "will always spend more than she has. A hole in the purse; a hole in the purse."

"She says," went on Lucy, looking through the letter with wrinkled forehead, "that they're all very hard-up indeed. Of course, I knew that; I can see it whenever I go there; only Peter will never take more than silly little clothes and things for Thomas. And now Peggy says they're in great straits; Thomas is going to teethe or something, and wants better milk, all from one cow, and they're all awfully in debt."

"I should fancy that was chronic," remarked Denis, turning to Essence of Parliament.

"A hole in the purse, a hole in the purse," muttered Lord Evelyn, tapping with his eye-glass.

"Peggy says that Peter won't ask for help himself, but he's let her, it seems. And their boarders are nearly all gone, one of them quite suddenly, without paying a sixpence for all the time he was there."

"I suppose he didn't think he'd had sixpence worth," said Denis. "He was probably right."

"And Thomas is still very delicate after his bronchitis, and Peter's got a bad cold on the chest and wants more cough-mixture than they can afford to buy; and they owe money to the butcher and the fishmonger and the baker and the doctor and the tailor, and Hilary's lost his latest job and isn't earning anything at all. So I suppose Peter is keeping the family."

"Scamps; scamps all," muttered Lord Evelyn. "Deserve all they get, and more. People like the Margerisons an't worth helping. They'd best go under at once; best go under. Swindlers and scamps, the lot of them. I daresay the woman's stories are half lies; of course, they want money, but it's probably only to spend on nonsense. Why can't they keep themselves, like decent people?"

"Oh," said Lucy, dismissing that as absurd, "they can't. Of course they can't. They never could ... Denis."

"Lucy." Denis absently put out a hand to meet hers.

"How much shall we give them, Denis?"

Denis dropped Punch onto the floor, and lay back with his hands clasped behind his fair head. Lucy, looking at his up-turned, foreshortened, cleanly-modelled face, thought with half of her mind what a perfect thing it was. Sudden aspects of Denis's beauty sometimes struck her breathless, as they struck Peter.

"The Margerison family wants money, I understand," said Denis, who hadn't been listening attentively.

"Very badly, Denis."

Denis nodded. "They always do, of course.... Well, is it our business to fill the bottomless Margerison purse?"

Lucy sat very still, looking up at him with wide eyes.

"Our business? I don't know. But, of course, if Peter and Peter's people want anything, we shall give it them."

"But I gather it's not Peter that asks? Peter never asks, does he?"

"No," said Lucy. "Peter never asks. Not even for Thomas."

"Well, I should be inclined to trust Peter rather than his charming family. Peter's name seems to be dragged into that letter a good deal, but it doesn't follow that Peter sanctioned it. I'm not going to annoy Peter by sending him what he's never asked for. I should think probably Peter knows they can get on all right as they are, and that this letter must be taken with a good deal of salt. I expect the egregious Hilary only wants the money for some new enterprise of his own, that will fail, as usual. Anyhow, I really don't fancy having any further dealings with Hilary Margerison or his wife; I've had enough there. He's the most impossible cad and swindler."

"Swindlers all, swindlers all," said Lord Evelyn, getting up and pacing up and down the room, his hands behind his back.

Lucy, after a moment, said simply, "I shall give them something, Denis. I must. Don't you see? Whoever it was, I would. Because anyhow, they're poor and we're rich, and they want things we can give them. It's so obvious that when people ask one for things they must have them if one can give them. And when it's Peter who's in want, and Peter's baby, and Peter's people ..."

"You see," said Denis, "I doubt about Peter or the baby benefiting by anything we give them. It will all go down the drain where Hilary Margerison's money flows away. Give it to Peter or give it to his relations, it'll come to the same thing. Peter gives them every penny he gets, I don't doubt. You know what Peter is; he's as weak as a baby in his step-brother's hands; he lets himself be dragged into the most disgraceful transactions because he can't say no."