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.