m under gloomy
brows, seeing how she had sunk her chin on to one clenched hand, and was
looking down at the pennies on the floor sombrely. He was speculating on
her position, how it could be quite the same. She elucidated it a little
with, 'It's what one can take that counts ... nothing else.... So it's
quite the same.'

Tommy thought it over, and said, 'I see.'

Yet it seemed to him that what one had been offered might also, in the
long run, count a little--anyhow, in the retrospect.

Such an amount seemed to have been now admitted between them that Betty
could say, 'We're down on our luck, you and I.... Tommy, I'm horribly
sorry.'

The last was pity, and he took it from her now without wincing; that it
was 'quite the same' for both of them made it a simple thing to give
and take. He gave his in return, gently, now that her position had thus
emerged to him.

'I'm sorry, too,' he said.

So their affection for each other put out reaching, groping fingers
through the glooming mists of pain that blinded each. As yet that touch
could not heal: but it seemed to wait its hour.

Tommy returned to his drawing. Betty sought for and gathered up the
coins from the stone floor. Their copper jingling seemed to ring in her
soul dully. The beastly thing--to use Tommy's phrase--was that one must
oneself throw one's bright metal away. Though it might burn to the
touch, the flinging of it away was a wrenching that hurt more. Betty
envied Tommy, with the bitterness of his down-bent face before her; her
bitterness must of necessity be the deeper, because her bright metal had
been laid in her hands, to keep if she would. Also, to throw it away had
bruised and hurt not her alone....

Betty's thin, scarred hand covered her lips, steadying them.

'We shall be better soon,' she said to herself. 'We'll play in the
streets and smell the sea ... and summer's coming.... We shall be better
soon.'

Then she sought a narcotic in literature, and got from the shelf a book
of poetry and began to read:

'When you are out alone I hope
You will not meet the antelope....'

The Crevequers used often to cheer themselves with that book when they
were in low spirits. But to-night it did not seem efficacious. Betty
supposed she knew it too well; she could think as she read, which was
not desirable. So she turned to fiction, and read 'Sea Urchins.'

The church clocks struck ten. Tommy, holding his sketch from him, said,
'How damned bad!'