Tommy looked at her gloomily, under his brows. Betty never cried; tears no more belonged to her than to him. When they had been children, one had hardly ever cried without the other. Tommy looked at Betty's tears now, speculating on her 'mental standpoint,' and on how far she divined his. 'What's wrong?' he asked. 'Anything ... I can do...?' If it was merely the mental standpoint, he knew that she would not word it; so he exposed himself to her answer, unafraid. They had never failed each other by betraying such trust. The completeness of his trust enabled one to watch the other's tears without wincing. 'N-nothing,' said Betty, and her voice, in its weariness, caught upon a laugh, while her eyes were still wet. 'Only--only I think I've been talking too much to-day--and that's so tiring.' (It would seem that the Crevequers must lead an exhausting life.) 'And I met the baby Venables sitting outside a church, and it talked about beagling; you run after a hare till you catch it--did you know? It's so jolly. Thinking of that made me feel tired, I expect. And have you been stealing eighty out of the rent? Because I haven't.' She was counting the pence again, laying them in precarious piles on the arm of her chair. Tommy had gone to the window, and stood looking out into the soft darkness and the noisy street below, his hands in his pockets. Those tears had somehow a little loosed his speech. 'The beastly thing,' he said drearily, 'is how everything is such a bore, and how it will go on always, just like this.' Betty did not need him to tell her that that was a bad thing--one of them, but not the chief. She said: 'I know.' 'No; but you can't quite know,' Tommy told her, 'because--because for you it's rather different.' The quick movement of Betty's hand sent the pence scattering on to the floor, ringing on the bare stone. 'There'll be more than eighty out now,' she said. 'And it's not different; it's quite the same.' Tommy turned and faced her, pondering, looking at her from 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.