This settled, Mrs. Woodford found him much easier to deal with.  He had really, through his midnight invocation of the fairies, obtained an opening into a new world, and he was ready to believe that with no one to twit him with being a changeling or worse, he could avoid perpetual disgrace and punishment and live at peace.  Nor was he unwilling to promise Mrs. Woodford to say daily, and especially when tempted, one or two brief collects and ejaculations which she selected to teach him, as being as unlike as possible to the long extempore exercises which had made him hate the very name of prayer.  The Doctor gave him a Greek Testament, as being least connected with unpleasant recollections.

“And,” entreated Peregrine humbly, in a low voice to Mrs. Woodford on his last Sunday evening, “may I not have something of yours, to lay hold of, and remember you if—­when—­the evil spirit tries to lay hold of me again?”

She would fain have given him a prayer-book, but she knew that would be treason to his father, and with tears in her eyes and something of a pang, she gave him a tiny miniature of herself, which had been her husband’s companion at sea, and hung it round his neck with the chain of her own hair that had always held it.

“It will always keep my heart warm,” said Peregrine, as he hid it under his vest.  There was a shade of disappointment on Anne’s face when he showed it to her, for she had almost deemed it her own.

“Never mind, Anne,” he said; “I am coming back a knight like my uncle to marry you, and then it will be yours again.”

“I—­I’m not going to wed you—­I have another sweetheart,” added Anne in haste, lest he should think she scorned him.

“Oh, that lubberly Charles Archfield!  No fear of him.  He is promised long ago to some little babe of quality in London.  You may whistle for him.  So you’d better wait for me.”

“It is not true.  You only say it to plague me.”

“It’s as true as Gospel!  I heard Sir Philip telling one of the big black gowns one day in the Close, when I was sitting up in a tree overhead, how they had fixed a marriage between his son and his old friend’s daughter, who would have ever so many estates.  So I’d give that”—­snapping his fingers—­“for your chances of being my Lady Archfield in the salt mud at Fareham.”

“I shall ask Lucy.  It is not kind of you, Perry, when you are just going away.”

“Come, come, don’t cry, Anne.”

“But I knew Charley ever so long first, and—­”

“Oh, yes.  Maids always like straight, comely, dull fellows, I know that.  But as you can’t have Charles Archfield, I mean to have you, Anne—­for I shall look to you as the only one as can ever make a good man of me!  Ay—­your mother—­I’d wed her if I could, but as I can’t, I mean to have you, Anne Woodford.”

“I don’t mean to have you!  I shall go to Court, and marry some noble earl or gentleman!  Why do you laugh and make that face, Peregrine? you know my father was almost a knight—­”