What he did say was, “This is Thomas.  And this is San Francesco, and this is Suor Clara.  They’re all mine.  Do you like their faces?”

Ashe looked at Francesco, and said, “Rather a mongrel, isn’t he?” and Peter took the comment as condemning the four of them, and divined in Ashe the respectability of the sheltered life, and was compassionate again.  Ashe cared, during the brief space of time allotted to him, to be respectably dressed; he cared to lead what he would call a decent life.  Peter, in his disreputability, felt like a man in the open air who looks into the prison of a sick-room.

Ashe said he was staying at Varenzano with his mother, and they were passing through Castoleto on the way back from their afternoon’s drive.

“It’s lungs, you know.  They don’t give me much chance—­the doctors, I mean.  It’s warm and sheltered on this coast, so I have to be here.  I’d rather be here, I suppose, than doing a beef-and-snow cure in one of those ghastly places.  But it’s a bore hanging round and doing nothing.  I’d as soon it ended straight off.”

Ashamed of having been so communicative (but Peter was used to people being unreserved with him, and never thought it odd), he changed the subject.

“Are you on the tramp, or what?  Is it comfortable?”

“Very,” said Peter, “and interesting.”

“Is it interesting?  How long are you going on with it?  When are you going home?”

“Oh, this is as much home as anywhere else, you know.  I don’t see any reason for leaving it yet.  We all like it.  I’ve no money, you see, and life is cheap here, and warm and nice.”

“Cheap and warm and nice....”  Ashe repeated it, vaguely surprised.  He hadn’t realised that Peter was one of the permanently destitute, and tramping not from pleasure but from necessity.

“What do you do?” he asked curiously, seeing that Peter was not at all embarrassed.

“Oh, nothing very much.  A little needlework, which I sell as I go along.  And various sorts of peddling, sometimes.  I’m going up to the hotel this evening, to try and make the people there buy things from me.  And we just play about, you know, and enjoy the roads and the towns and the fairs and the seashore.  It’s all fun.”

Ashe laughed and made himself cough.

“You awfully queer person!  You really like it, living like that?...  But even I don’t like it, you know, living shut away from life in this corner, though I’ve money enough to be comfortable with.  Should I like it, your life, I wonder?  You’re not bored, it seems.  I always am.  What is it you like so much?”

Peter said, lots of things.  No, he wasn’t bored; things were too amusing for that.

They couldn’t get any further, because Ashe’s mother called him from the carriage in the road.  She too looked tired, and had sad eyes.

Peter looked after them with compassion.  They were wasting their little time together terribly, being sad when they should have found, in these last few months or years of life, quiet fun on the warm shore where they had come to make loss less bitter.