“You poor little dears,” said Peggy, and kissed both of them.  “Well, it’ll be plain living for the lot of us, that’s obvious, and lucky too to get that....  I’d love to have you two children with us, but ...”

But Peter, to whom other people’s minds were as books that who runs may read, had no intention of coming with them.  That faculty of intuition of Peter’s had drawbacks as well as advantages.  He knew, as well as if Hilary had said so, that Hilary considered their life together a disastrous series of mishaps, largely owing to Peter, and that he did not desire to continue it.  He knew precisely what was Denis Urquhart’s point of view and state of feelings towards himself and his family, and how unbridgeable that gulf was.  He knew why Lucy was stopping away, and would stop away (for if other people’s thoughts were to him as pebbles in running water, hers were pebbles seen white and lucid in a still, clear pool).  And he knew very well that he relieved Peggy’s kind heart when he said he and Thomas would stop in London; for to Peggy anything was better than to worry her poor old Hilary more than need be.

So, before March was out, about St. Cuthbert’s day, in fact, Hilary Margerison and his family left England for a more distressful country, to seek their fortunes fresh, and Peter and his family sought modest apartments in a little street behind St. Austin’s Church, where the apartments are very modest indeed.

“Are they too modest for you, Thomas?” Peter asked dubiously.  “And do you too much hate the Girl?”

The Girl was the landlady’s daughter, and undertook for a small consideration to look after Thomas while Peter was out, and feed him at suitable intervals.  Thomas and Peter did rather hate her, for she was a slatternly girl, matching her mother and her mother’s apartments, and didn’t always take her curlers off till the evening, and said “Boo” to Thomas, merely because he was young—­a detestable habit, Peter and Thomas considered.  Peter had to make a great deal of sensible conversation to Thomas, to make up.

“I’m sorry,” Peter apologised, “but, you see, Thomas, it’s all we can afford.  You don’t earn anything at all, and I only earn a pound a week, which is barely enough to keep you in drink.  I don’t deserve even that, for I don’t address envelopes well; but I suppose they know it’s such a detestable job that they haven’t the face to give me less.”

Peter was addressing envelopes because a Robinson relative had given him the job, and he hadn’t the nerve to refuse it.  He couldn’t well refuse it, because of Thomas.  Uncompanioned by Thomas he would probably have chosen instead to sweep a crossing or play a barrel-organ, or stand at a street corner with outstretched hat (though this last would only have done for a summer engagement, as Peter didn’t like the winds that play round street corners in winter).  But Thomas was very much there, and had to be provided for; so Peter copied letters and addressed envelopes