Thus did Peter talk to Thomas of an evening, when they sat together after tea over the fire.

Sometimes he told him news of the world of men.  One evening he said to him, very gently and pitifully, “Dear old man, your mother’s dead.  For her sake, one’s glad, I suppose.  You and I must try to look at it from her point of view.  She’s escaped from a poor business.  Some day I’ll read you the letter she wrote to you and me as she lay dying; but not yet, for I never read you sad things, do I?  But some day you may be glad to know that she had thoughts for you at the last.  She was sorry she left us, Thomas; horribly, dreadfully sorry....  I wish she hadn’t been.  I wish she could have gone on being happy till the end.  It was my fault that she did it, and it didn’t even make her happy.  And I suppose it killed her at the last; or would she anyhow have escaped that way before long?  But I took more care of her than he did....  And now she’ll never come back to us.  I’ve thought sometimes, Thomas, that perhaps she would; that perhaps she would get tired of him, so tired that she would leave him and come back to us, and then you’d have had a mother to do for you instead of only me and the Girl.  Poor little Thomas; you’ll never have a mother now.  I’m sorry, sorry, sorry about it.  Sorry for you, and sorry for her, and sorry for all of us.  It’s a pitiful world, Thomas, it seems.  I wonder how you’re going to get through it.”

Never before had he talked to Thomas like that.  He had been used to speak to him of new-burnisht joys and a world of treasure.  But of late Peter had been conscious of increasing effort in being cheerful before Thomas.  It was as if the little too much that breaks had been laid upon him and under it he was breaking.  For the first time he was seeing the world not as a glorious treasure-place full of glad things for touch and sight and hearing, full of delightful people and absurd jokes, but as a grey and lonely sea through which one drifted rudderless towards a lee shore.  He supposed that there was, somewhere, a lee shore; a place where the winds, having blown their uttermost, ceased to blow, and where wrecked things were cast up at last broken beyond all mending and beyond all struggling, to find the peace of the utterly lost.  He had not got there yet; he and his broken boat were struggling in the grey cold waters, which had swept all his cargo from him, bale by bale.  From him that hath not shall indeed be taken away even that which he hath.

It was Thomas who caused Peter to think of these things newly; Thomas, who was starting life with so poor a heritage.  For Thomas, so like himself, Peter foresaw the same progressive wreckage.  Thomas too, having already lost a mother, would lose later all he loved; he would give to some friend all he was and had, and the friend would drop him in the mud and leave him there, and the cold bitterness as of death would go over Thomas’s head.  He would, perhaps, love a woman too, and the woman would leave