The boarding-house suddenly ceased to be. Its long illness ended in natural death. There was a growing feeling among the boarders that no self-respecting person could remain with people whose financial affairs were in the precarious¹ condition of the Margerisons'—people who couldn't pay the butcher, and lived on ill-founded expectations of subsidies². As two years ago the Margerisons had been thrown roughly out of the profession of artistic³ experts, so now the doors of the boarding-house world were shut upon them. Boarders are like that; intensely respectable.  
All the loosed dogs of ill-fortune seemed to be yelping⁴ at the Margerisons' heels at once. Hilary, when he recovered from his influenza⁵ and went out to look for jobs, couldn't find one. Again and again he was curtly⁶ refused employment, by editors and others. Every night he came home a little more bitter than the day before. Peter too, while he lay mending of his breakages, received a letter from the place of business he adorned⁷ informing him that it would not trouble him further. He had never been much use to it; he had been taken on at Leslie's request and given a trial; but it could not last for ever, as Peter fair-mindedly admitted.
 
"Well," he commented, "I suppose one must do something else, eventually. But I shall put off reflecting on that till I can move about more easily."
 
Hilary said, "We are being hounded out of London as we were hounded out of Venice. It is unbearable⁸. What remains⁹?"
 
"Nothing, that I can see at the moment," said Peter, laughing weakly.
 
"Ireland," said Peggy suddenly. "Let's go there. Dublin's worth a dozen of this hideous¹⁰ old black dirty place. You could get work on 'The Nationalist,' Hilary, I do believe, for the sub-editorship's just been given to my cousin Larry Callaghan. Come along to the poor old country, and we'll try our luck again."
 
"Dublin I believe to be an unspeakable place to live in," said Hilary, but mainly from habit. "Still, I presume one must live somewhere, so ..."
 
He turned to Peter. "Where shall you and Thomas live?"
 
Peter flushed slightly. He had supposed that he and Thomas were also to live in the unspeakable Dublin.
 
"Oh, we haven't quite made up our minds. I must consult Thomas about it."
 
"But," broke in Peggy, "of course you're coming with us, my dear. What do you mean? You're not surely going to desert us now, Peter?"
 
Peter glanced at Hilary. Hilary said, pushing his hair, with his restless gesture, from his forehead, "Really, Peggy, we can't drag Peter about after us all our lives; it's hardly fair on him to involve him in all our disasters, when he has more than enough of his own."
 
"Indeed and he has. Peter's mischancier than you are, Hilary, on the whole, and I will not leave him and Tommy to get lost or broken by themselves. Don't be so silly, Peter; of course you're coming with us."
 
"I think," said Peter, "that Thomas and I will perhaps stay in London. You see, I can't, probably, get work on 'The Nationalist' and it's doubtful what I could do in Dublin. I suppose I can get work of a sort in London; enough to provide Thomas with milk, though possibly not all from one cow."
 
"I daresay. And who'd look after the mite¹¹, I'd like to know, while you're earning his milk?"
 
"Oh, the landlady¹², I should think. Everyone likes Thomas; he's remarkably¹³ popular."
 
Afterwards Hilary said to Peggy, "Really, Peggy, I see no reason why Peter should be dragged about with us in the future. The joint¹⁴ ménage has not, in the past, been such a success that we need want to perpetuate¹⁵ it. In fact, though, of course, it is pleasant to have Peter in the house...."
 
"Indeed it is, the darling," put in Peggy.
 
"One can't deny that disasters have come upon us extraordinarily¹⁶ fast since he came to live with us in Venice two years ago. First he discovered things that annoyed him in my private affairs, which was extremely disagreeable for all of us, and really he was rather unnecessarily officious about that; in fact, I consider that it was owing largely to the line he took that things reached their final very trying dénouement. Since then disaster upon disaster has come upon us; Peter's unfortunate marriage, and consequent serious expenses, including the child now left upon his hands (really, you know, that was an exceedingly stupid step that Peter took; I tried to dissuade¹⁷ him at the time, but of course it was no use). And he is so very frequently ill; so am I, you will say"—(Peggy didn't, because Hilary wasn't, as a matter of fact, ill quite so often as he believed)—"but two crocks in a household are twice as inconvenient¹⁸ as one. And now there has been this unpleasant jar with the Urquharts. Peter, by his rudeness to them, has finally severed¹⁹ the connection, and we can hope for nothing from that quarter in future. And I am not sure that I choose to have living with me a much younger brother who has influential²⁰ friends of his own in whom he insists that we shall have neither part nor lot. I strongly object to the way Peter spoke²¹ to us on that occasion; it was extremely offensive."
 
"Oh, don't be such a goose, Hilary. The boy only lost his temper for a moment, and I'm sure that happens seldom enough. And as to the rest of it, I don't like the way you speak of him, as if he was the cause of our mischances, and as if his being so mischancey himself wasn't a reason why we should all stick together, and him with that scrap²² of a child, too; though I will say Peter's a handier creature with a child than anyone would think. I suppose it's the practice he's had handling other costly²³ things that break easy.... Well, have it your own way, Hilary. Only mind, if Peter wants to come with us, he surely shall. I'm not going to leave him behind like a left kitten. And I'd love to have him, for he makes sunshine in the house when things are blackest."
 
"Lately Peter has appeared to me to be rather depressed," said Hilary, and Peggy too had perceived that this was so. It was something so new in Peter that it called for notice.
 
There was needed no further dispute between Peggy and Hilary, for Peter said that he and Thomas preferred to stay in London.
 
"I can probably find a job of some sort to keep us. I might with luck get a place as shop-walker. That always looks a glorious life. You merely walk about and say, 'Yes, madam? This way for hose, madam.' Something to live on and nothing to do, as the poet says. But I expect they are difficult places to get, without previous experience. Short of that, I could be one of the men round stations that open people's cab doors and take the luggage out; or even a bus-conductor, who knows? Oh, there are lots of openings. But in Dublin I feel my talents might be lost.... Thomas and I will move into more modest apartments, and go in for plain living and high thinking."
 
"You poor little dears," said Peggy, and kissed both of them. "Well, it'll be plain living for the lot of us, that's obvious, and lucky too to get that.... I'd love to have you two children with us, but ..."
 
But Peter, to whom other people's minds were as books that who runs may read, had no intention of coming with them. That faculty²⁴ of intuition of Peter's had drawbacks as well as advantages. He knew, as well as if Hilary had said so, that Hilary considered their life together a disastrous²⁵ series of mishaps²⁶, largely owing to Peter, and that he did not desire to continue it. He knew precisely²⁷ what was Denis Urquhart's point of view and state of feelings towards himself and his family, and how unbridgeable that gulf²⁸ was. He knew why Lucy was stopping away, and would stop away (for if other people's thoughts were to him as pebbles²⁹ in running water, hers were pebbles seen white and lucid³⁰ in a still, clear pool). And he knew very well that he relieved Peggy's kind heart when he said he and Thomas would stop in London; for to Peggy anything was better than to worry her poor old Hilary more than need be.
 
So, before March was out, about St. Cuthbert's day, in fact, Hilary Margerison and his family left England for a more distressful³¹ country, to seek their fortunes fresh, and Peter and his family sought modest apartments in a little street behind St. Austin's Church, where the apartments are very modest indeed.
 
"Are they too modest for you, Thomas?" Peter asked dubiously³². "And do you too much hate the Girl?"
 
The Girl was the landlady's daughter, and undertook for a small consideration to look after Thomas while Peter was out, and feed him at suitable intervals³³. Thomas and Peter did rather hate her, for she was a slatternly girl, matching her mother and her mother's apartments, and didn't always take her curlers off till the evening, and said "Boo" to Thomas, merely because he was young—a detestable habit, Peter and Thomas considered. Peter had to make a great deal of sensible conversation to Thomas, to make up.
 
"I'm sorry," Peter apologised, "but, you see, Thomas, it's all we can afford. You don't earn anything at all, and I only earn a pound a week, which is barely enough to keep you in drink. I don't deserve even that, for I don't address envelopes well; but I suppose they know it's such a detestable job that they haven't the face to give me less."
 
Peter was addressing envelopes because a Robinson relative had given him the job, and he hadn't the nerve to refuse it. He couldn't well refuse it, because of Thomas. Uncompanioned by Thomas he would probably have chosen instead to sweep a crossing or play a barrel-organ, or stand at a street corner with outstretched hat (though this last would only have done for a summer engagement, as Peter didn't like the winds that play round street corners in winter). But Thomas was very much there, and had to be provided for; so Peter copied letters and addressed envelopes and earned twenty shillings weekly, and out of it paid for Thomas's drink and Thomas's Girl and his own food, and beds and a sitting-room³⁴ and fires and laundry for both, and occasional luxuries in the way of wooden animals for Thomas to play with. So they were not extremely poor; they were respectably well-to-do. For Thomas's sake, Peter supposed it was worth while not to be extremely poor, even though it meant addressing envelopes and living in a great grey prison-house of a city, where one only surmised³⁵ the first early pushings of the spring beyond the encompassing³⁶ gloom.
 
Peter used to tell Thomas about that, in order that he might know something of the joyous³⁷ world beyond the walls. He told Thomas in March, taking time by the forelock, about the early violets that were going some time to open blue eyes in the ditches by the roads where the spring winds walk; about the blackthorn that would suddenly make a white glory of the woods; about the green, sticky budding of the larches³⁸, and the keen sweet smell of them, and the damp fragrance³⁹ of the roaming wind that would blow over river-flooded fields, smelling of bonfires and wet earth. He took him through the seasons, telling him of the blown golden armies of the daffodils that marched out for Easter, and the fragrant⁴⁰ white glory of the may; and the pale pink stars of the hedge-roses, and the yellow joy of buttercup fields wherein cows stand knee-deep and munch⁴¹, in order to give Thomas sweet white milk.
 
"Ugh," said Thomas, making a face, and Peter answered, "Yes, I know; sometimes they come upon an onion-flower and eat that, and that's not nice, of course. But mostly it's grass and buttercups and clover." Then he told him of hot July roads, where the soft white dust lies, while the horses and the cows stand up to their middles in cool streams beneath the willows⁴² and switch their tails, and the earth dreams through the year's hot noon; and of August, the world's welfare and the earth's warming-pan, and how, in the fayre rivers, swimming is a sweet exercise. "And my birthday comes then. Oh, 'tis the merry time, wherein honest neighbours make good cheer, and God is glorified⁴³ in his blessings⁴⁴ on the earth. Then cometh September, Thomas"—Peter was half talking, half reading out of a book he had got to amuse Thomas—"then cometh September, and then he (that's you, Thomas) doth freshly beginne to garnish^{4............}