In Brook¹ Street the rain fell. It fell straight and disconsolate², unutterably wet, splashing drearily³ on the paved street between the rows of wet houses. It fell all day, from the dim dawn, through the murky⁴ noon, to the dark evening, desolately⁵ weeping over a tired city.  
Inside number fifty-one, Peggy mended clothes and sang a little song, with Thomas in her lap, and Peter, sitting in the window-seat, knitted Thomas a sweater of Cambridge blue. Peter was getting rather good at knitting. Hilary was there too, but not mending, or knitting, or singing; he was coughing, and complaining of the climate.
 
"I fancy it is going to be influenza⁶," he observed at intervals⁷, shivering. "I feel extraordinarily⁸ weak, and ache all up my back. I fancy I have a high temperature, only Peter has broken the thermometer. You were a hundred and four, I think, Peter, the day you went to bed. I rather expect I am a hundred and five. But I suppose I shall never know, as it is impossible to afford another thermometer. I feel certain it is influenza; and in that case I must give up all hope of getting that job from Pickering, as I cannot possibly go and see him to-morrow. Not but that it would be a detestable job, anyhow; but anything to keep our heads above water.... My headache is now like a hot metal band all round my head, Peggy."
 
"Poor old boy," said Peggy. "Take some more phenacetine. And do go to bed, Hilary. If you have got flu, you'll only make yourself as bad as Peter did by staying up too long. You've neither of you any more sense than Tommy here, nor so much, by a long way, have they, little man? No, Kitty, let him be; you'd only drop him on the floor if I let you, and then he'd break, you know."
 
Silvio was kneeling up on the window-seat by Peter's side, taking an interest in the doings of the street.
 
Peggy said, "Well, Larry, what's the news of the great world?"
 
"It's raining," said Silvio, who had something of the mournful timbre⁹ of Hilary's voice in his.
 
Peggy said, "Oh, darling, be more interesting! I'm horribly afraid you're going to grow up obvious, Larry, and that will never do. What else is it doing?"
 
"There's a cat in the rain," said Silvio, flattening¹⁰ his nose against the blurred¹¹ glass, and manifestly inclined to select the sadder aspects of the world's news for retail¹³. That tendency too, perhaps, he inherited from Hilary.
 
Presently he added, "There's a taxi coming up the street," and Peggy placed Thomas on Peter's knees and came to the window to look. When she had looked she said to Peter, "It must be nearly six o'clock" (the clock gained seventeen minutes a day, so that the time was always a matter for nicer calculation than Peggy could usually afford to give it); "and if Hilary's got flu, I should think Tommy'd be best out of the room.... I haven't easily the time to put him to bed this evening, really."
 
Peter accepted the suggestion and conveyed his son from the room. As he did so, someone knocked at the front door, and Peggy ran downstairs to open it.
 
She let in the unhappy noise of the rain and a tall, slim person in a fur coat.
 
Peggy was surprised, and (most rarely) a little embarrassed. It wasn't the person she had looked for. She even, in her unwonted confusion, let the visitor speak first.
 
He said, "Is Mr. Peter Margerison in?" frostily, giving her no sign of recognition.
 
"He is not, Lord Evelyn," said Peggy, hastily. "That is, he is busy with the baby upstairs. Will I take him a message?"
 
"I shall be glad if you will tell him I have called to see him."
 
"I will, Lord Evelyn. Will you come up to the drawing-room while I get him?"
 
Peggy led the way, drawing meanwhile on the resources of a picturesque¹⁴ imagination.
 
"He may be a little while before he can leave the baby, Lord Evelyn. Poor mite¹⁵, it's starved with hunger, the way it cries and cries and won't leave off, and Peter has to cheer it."
 
Lord Evelyn grunted¹⁶. The steep stairs made him a little short of breath, and not sympathetic.
 
"And even," went on Peggy, stopping outside the drawing-room door, "even when it does get a feed of milk, it's to-day from one kind of cow, to-morrow from another. Why, you'd think all the cows in England, turn and turn about, supplied that poor child with milk; and you know they get pains from changing. It's not right, poor baby; but what can we and his father do? The same with his scraps¹⁷ of clothes—this weather he'd a right to be having new warm ones—but there he lies crying for the cold in his little thin out-grown things; it brings the tears to one's eyes to see him. And he's not the only one, either. His father's just out of an illness, and keeps a cough on the chest because he can't afford a warm waistcoat or the only cough-mixture that cures him.... But Peter wouldn't like me to be telling you all this. Will you go in there, Lord Evelyn, and wait?"
 
She paused another moment, her hand on the handle.
 
"You'll not tell Peter I told you anything. He'd not be pleased. He'll not breathe a word to you of it himself—indeed, he'll probably say it's not so."
 
Lord Evelyn made no comment; he merely tapped his cane¹⁹ on the floor; he seemed impatient to have the door opened.
 
"And," added Peggy, "if ever you chanced to be offering him anything—I mean, you might be for giving him a birthday present, or a Xmas present or something sometime—you'd do best to put it as a gift to the baby, or he'll never take it."
 
Having concluded her diplomacy²⁰, she opened the door and ushered²¹ him into the room, where Hilary sat with his headache and the children played noisily at horses.
 
"Lord Evelyn Urquhart come to see Peter," called Peggy into the room. "Come along out of that, children, and keep yourselves quiet somewhere."
 
She bundled them out and shut the door on Lord Evelyn and Hilary.
 
Hilary rose dizzily to his feet and bowed. Lord Evelyn returned the courtesy distantly, and stood by the door, as far as possible from his host.
 
"This is good of you," said Hilary, "to come and see us in our fallen estate. Do sit down."
 
Lord Evelyn, putting his glass into his eye and turning it upon Hilary as if in astonishment²² at his impertinence in addressing him, said curtly²³, "I came to see your half-brother. I had not the least intention, nor the least desire, to see anyone else whatever; nor have I now."
 
"Quite so," said Hilary, his teeth chattering²⁴ with fever. (His temperature, though he would never know, as Peter had broken the thermometer, must be anyhow a hundred and three, he was sure.) "Quite so. But that doesn't affect my gratitude²⁵ to you. Peter's friends are mine. I must thank you for remembering Peter."
 
Lord Evelyn, presumably not seeing the necessity, was silent.
 
"We have not met," Hilary went on, passing his hot hand over his fevered brow, where the headache ran all round like a hot metal band, "for a very long time, Lord Evelyn; if we put aside that momentary²⁶ encounter at Astleys last year." Hilary did put that aside, rather hastily, and went on, "Apart from that, we have not met since we were both in Venice, nearly two years ago. Lord Evelyn, I have often wished to tell you how very deeply I have regretted certain events that came between us there. I think there is a great deal that I might explain to you...."
 
Lord Evelyn, with averted²⁷ face, said, "Be good enough to be silent, sir. I have no desire to hear any of your remarks. I have come merely to see your half-brother."
 
"Of course," said Hilary, who was sensitive, "if you take that line, there is nothing to be said between you and me."
 
Lord Evelyn acknowledged this admission with a slight inclination²⁸ of the head.
 
"Nothing whatever, sir."
 
So there was silence, till Peter came in, pale and sickly and influenzaish, but with a smile for Lord Evelyn. It was extraordinarily nice of Lord Evelyn, he thought, to have come all the way to Brook Street in the rain to see him.
 
Lord Evelyn looked at him queerly, intently, out of his short-sighted eyes as they shook hands.
 
"I wish to talk to you," he remarked, with meaning.
 
Hilary took the hint, looked proud, said, "I see that my room is preferred to my company," and went away.
 
When he had gone, Peter said, "Do sit down," but Lord Evelyn took no notice of that. He had come to see Peter in his need, but he had not f............