"Go away now." Peter flung out the words like another oath. "Go away to your poverty which you like, and leave us to ours which we hate. There's no more left for you to take away from us; it's all gone. Unless you'd like me to throw Thomas out of the window, since you think breakages are so good."
Rodney merely said, "I'm not going away just yet. Could you let me stay here for the night and sleep on the sofa? It's late to go back to-night."
"Sleep where you like," said Peter. "There's the bed. I don't want it."
But Rodney stretched himself instead on the horse-hair sofa. He said no more, knowing that the time for words was past. He lay tired and quiet, with closed eyes, knowing how Peter and the other disreputable forsaken outcast sat together huddled on the floor through the dim night, till the dawn looked palely in and showed them both fallen asleep, Peter's head resting on Francesco's yellow back.
It was Rodney who got up stiffly from his hard resting-place in the dark unlovely morning, and made tea over Peter's spirit-lamp for both of them. Peter woke later, and drank it mechanically. Then he looked at Rodney and said, "I'm horribly stiff. Why did neither of us go to bed?" He was pale and heavy-eyed, and violent no more, but very quiet and tired, as if, accepting, he was sinking deep in grey and cold seas, that numbed resistance and drowned words.
The milk came in, and Peter gave Thomas to drink; and on the heels of the milk came the post, and a letter for Peter.
"I suppose," said Peter dully, as he opened it, "she too has found out that it can't be done."
The letter said: "Peter, we can't do it. I am horribly, horribly sorry, but I know it now for certain. Perhaps you know it too, by now. Because the reason is in you, not in me. It is that you love Denis too much. So you couldn't be happy. I want you to be happy, more than I want anything in the world, but it can't be this way. Please, dear Peter, be happy sometime; please, please be happy. I love you always—if that helps at all.—Lucy."
Peter let the note fall on the floor, and stood with bent head by the side of Thomas's crib, while Thomas guggled his milk.
"Two minds with but a single thought," he remarked, in that new, dreary voice of his. "As always.... Well, it saves trouble. And we're utterly safe now, you see; doubly safe. You can go home in peace."