His manner was so passionately earnest that the astonished boy took his head in his hands to consider this amazing proposition.

“But how in heaven’s name can I study if I’m plagued with a wife?” he demanded.  “I want to be foot-loose!”

“All right.  You shall be foot-loose, for seven years, let’s say,” said his uncle, quietly.  “I reason that if you are ever going to be anything, you’ll at least have made a beginning within seven years!  You’re twenty now, are you not?  When you marry my girl, you shall go abroad immediately.  She’ll stay with me until her education is completed.  Your wife shall be trained to take her proper place in the world.  On your twenty-seventh birthday you will return and claim her.  I do not need anything more than the bare word of a Champneys that he’ll be what a man should be.  Milly’s niece will be safe in your keeping.—­Well?”

“Let me think a bit, Uncle.”

“Take until morning.  In the meanwhile, please help me get my car under shelter, and show me where I turn in for the night.”  Being in some things a very considerate old man, he did not add that he had found the day strenuous, and that his strength was ebbing.

Peter, lying on the lounge in the dining-room, was unable to sleep.  Was this the chance his mother had said would come?  Wasn’t matrimony rather a small price to pay for it?  Or was it?  And—­hadn’t he promised his mother to take it when it came, for the sake of all the Champneyses dead and gone, and for her own sake who had loved him so tenderly and believed in him against all odds?

At dawn he stole out of the house, and walked the three miles to the country cemetery where his mother slept beside his father.  He sat beside her last bed, and remembered the cold hand that had crept into his, the faltering whisper that prayed him to take his chance when it came, and to prove himself.

If he refused this miraculous opportunity, there would be Riverton, and the hardware store, or other country stores similar to it, to the end of his days.  No freedom, no glorious opportunities, no work of brain and hand together, no beauty wrought of thought and experience; the purple peaks fading into farther and farther distances until they faded out of his sky altogether; and himself a sorry plodder in a path whose dust choked him.  Peter shuddered.  Anything but that!

Mr. Chadwick Champneys was sitting by the dining-room table talking to astonished Emma Campbell, and stroking the cat, when Peter came swinging into the room.

“Well?” with a keen glance at his nephew’s face.

“Yes,” said Peter, deliberately.

The old man went on stroking the cat for a moment or so, while Emma Campbell, the hominy-spoon in her hand, watched them both.  She understood that something momentous portended.  Not for nothing had this shrewd, imperious old man whom she had known in his youth as wild Chad Champneys, led Emma on to tell him all she knew about the family history since his departure, years ago.  When Emma had finished, Chadwick Champneys felt that he knew his nephew to the bone; and it was Champneys bone!