Peter was on his feet and out of the door in a second.  He saw Vyvian in the passage downstairs, putting on his coat.  He spoke from half-way down the stairs: 

“Oh, Miss Johnson asks me to say she is sorry she can’t go with you to-morrow night after all; she finds she has another engagement.”

Vyvian turned and looked up at him, a slight smile lifting his lip.

“Really?” was all he said.  “All the same, I think I will call at seven and try to persuade her to change her mind again.  Good night.”

As plainly as possible he had said to Peter, “I believe you to be lying.”  Peter had no particular objection to his believing that; he was not proud; but he did object to his calling at seven and trying to persuade Rhoda to change her mind again, for he believed that that would be a task easy of achievement.

He went back into the sitting-room.  Rhoda was sitting still, her hands twisted together on the green serge on her lap.  Peter sat down by her and said, “Will you come out with me instead to-morrow evening?” and she looked at him, her teeth clenched over her lower lip as if to steady it, and said after a moment, forlornly, “If you like.”

It was so much less exciting than going with Vyvian would have been, that Peter felt compunction.

“You shall choose the play,” he said. “‘Peter Pan,’ do you think?  Or something funny—­’The Sins of Society,’ or something?”

Rhoda whispered “Anything,” nearly on the edge of tears.  A vividness had flashed again into her grey life, and she was trying to quench it.  She had heroically, though as an afterthought, flung an extinguishing douche of water at it; but now that she had done so she was melting into unheroic self-pity.

“I want to go to bed,” she said shakily, and did so, feeling for her pocket-handkerchief as she crossed the room.

At a quarter to seven the next evening Peter looked for Rhoda, thinking it well that they should be out of the house by seven o’clock, but couldn’t find her, till Miss Clegson said she had met her “going into church” as she herself came out.  Peter went to the church to find her.  Rhoda didn’t as a rule frequent churches, not believing in the creeds they taught; but even to the unbelieving a church is often a refuge.

Peter, coming into the great dim place out of the wet fog, found it again, as he had long since known it to be, a refuge from fogs and other ills of living.  Far up, the seven lamps that never go out burned dimly through the blurred air.  It was a gaudy place, no doubt; over-decorated; a church for the poor, who love gaudiness.  Perhaps Peter too loved gaudiness.  Anyhow, he loved this place and its seven lamps and its shrines and statued saints.

Surely, whatever one believed of the mysterious world and of all the other mysterious worlds that might be floating behind the veils, surely here was a very present help in trouble, a luminous brightness shining in a fog-choked world.