ell strange and
tranquil on the soft wood silence:

"What I didn't quite know was whether you would come and take it--the
good time--or whether I should have to come and bring it to you. I was
going to have come, you know. I had quite settled that. It's taken me
a long time to know that I must: but I do know it now."

"You didn't come," said Peter suddenly, and his hands clenched sharply
over the ivy trails and tore them out of the earth, and his face whitened
to the lips. "All this time ... you didn't come ... you kept away...."
The memory of that black emptiness shook him. He hadn't realised till it
was nearly over quite how bad it had been, that emptiness.

The two pale faces, so like, were quivering with the same pain, the same
keen recognition of it.

"No," Lucy whispered. "I didn't come ... I kept away."

Peter said, steadying his voice, "But now you will. Now I may come to
you. Oh, I know why you kept away. You thought it would be less hard for
me if I didn't see you. But don't again. It isn't less hard. It's--it's
impossible. First Denis, then you. I can't bear it. I only want to see
you sometimes; just to feel you're there. I won't be grasping, Lucy."

"Yes," said Lucy calmly, "you will. You're going to be grasping in
future. You're going to take and have.... Peter, my dear, haven't you
reached the place I've reached yet? Don't you know that between you and
me it's got to be all or nothing? I've learnt that now. So I tried
nothing. But that won't do. So now it's going to be all.... I'm coming to
Thomas and you. We three together will find nice things for one another."

Peter's forehead was on his drawn-up knees. He felt her hand touch his
head, and shivered a little.

"Denis," he whispered.

She answered, "Denis has everything. Denis won't miss me among so much.
Denis is the luckiest, the most prosperous, the most succeeding person I
know. Peter, let me try and tell you about Denis and me."

She paused for a moment, leaning her head back against the beech-tree and
looking up wide-eyed at the singing roof overhead.

"You know how it was, I expect," she said, with the confidence they
always had in each other's knowledge, that saved so many words. "How
Denis came among us, among you and me and father and Felicity and our
unprosperous, dingy friends, and how he was all bright and shining and
beautiful, and I loved him, partly because he was so bright and
beautiful, and a great deal because you did, and