She bent down to him, reaching out her hands, and Thomas smiled on her lap.  So for a moment the three stayed, and the woods were hushed round them, waiting.  Then in the green roof above a riot of shrill, sweet triumph broke the hush, and Peter leaped to his feet and laughed.

“Oh, Lucy, let’s.  Why not?  I told Thomas the day before yesterday that we were going to have a good time now.  Well, then, let’s have it.  Who’s to prevent it?  It’s our turn; it’s our turn.  We’ll begin from now and take things and keep them....  Oh, d’you mean it, Lucy?  D’you mean you’ll come and play with us, for ever and ever?”

“’Course I will,” she said, simply, like a child.

He fell on his knees beside her and leant on his hands and peered into Thomas’s face.

“Do you hear, Thomas?  She’s coming; she’s coming to us, for always.  You wanted her, didn’t you?  You wanted her nearly as much as I did, only you didn’t know it so well....  Oh, Lucy, oh, Lucy, oh, Lucy ...  I’ve wanted you so ...”

“I’ve wanted you too,” she said.  “I haven’t talked about that part of it, ’cause it’s so obvious, and I knew you knew.  All the time, even when I thought I cared for Denis, I was only half a person without you.  Of course, I always knew that, without thinking much about it, from the time we were babies.  Only I didn’t know it meant this; I thought it was more like being brother and sister, and that we could both be happy just seeing each other sometimes.  It’s only rather lately that I’ve known it had to be everything.  There’s nothing at all to say about the way we care, Peter, because it’s such an old stale thing; it’s always been, and I s’pose it always will be.  ’Tisn’t a new, surprising, sudden thing, like my falling in love with Denis.  It’s so deep, it’s got root right down at the bottom, before we can either of us remember.  It’s like this ivy that’s all over the ground, and out of which all the little flowers and things grow.  And when it’s like that....”

“Yes,” said Peter, “when it’s like that, there’s only one way to take.  What’s the good of fighting against life?  We’re not going to fight any more, Thomas and I. We’re going simply to grab everything we can get.  The more things the better; I always knew that.  Who wants to be a miserable Franciscan on the desert hills?  It’s so unutterably profane.  Here begins the new life.”

They sat in silence together on the creeping, earth-rooted ivy out of which all the little flowers and things grew; and all round them the birds sang how it was spring-time.  The fever of the spring was in Peter’s blood, flowing through his veins like fire, and he knew only that life was good and lovely and was calling to the three of them to come and live it, to take the April paths together through green woods.  The time was not long past, though it seemed endless years ago, when he would have liked them to be four, when he would have liked Denis to come too, because