As if they had parted but yesterday, they were able to resume their old sympathetic friendship, with its satisfying sense of comradely understanding.  Her heart warmed to him now as it had warmed to the shabby boy she had first seen running after the Red Admiral in the fields beyond the river swamp.  No, she reflected appraisingly, he had not changed.  He had somehow managed to retain a certain quality of childlikeness that made her feel as if she were looking through crystal.  She was grateful that no contact had been able to blunt it, that it remained undimmed and serene.

Briefly and rather baldly Peter outlined his years of struggle, dismissing their bleak hardships with a tolerant smile.  What he seemed chiefly to remember was the underlying kindness and good humor of the folk back there in Riverton; if they had ever failed to be kind, it was because they hadn’t understood, he thought.  There was no resentment in him.  Why, they were his own folks!  His mother’s grave was one of their graves, his name one of their names, their traditions and heritages were part and parcel of himself.  The tide-water was in his blood; his flesh was dust of the South Carolina coast.

She saw that, while he was speaking.  And against the vivid, colorful coast background she caught haunting glimpses of a tireless small figure toiling, sweating, always moving toward a far-off goal as with the inevitable directness of a fixed law.  She marveled at the patience of his strength, and she loved his gentleness, his sweetness that had a flavor of other-worldliness in it.

He was telling her now of Chadwick Champneys and how his coming had changed things.  But of the price he had had to pay he said nothing.  He tried not to think of the bride his uncle had forced upon him, though her narrowed eyes, her red hair, her mouth set in a hard red line haunted him like a nightmare.  His soul revolted against such a mockery of marriage.  He could imagine his mother’s horror, and he was glad Maria Champneys slept beside the husband of her youth in the cemetery beside the Riverton Road.  She wouldn’t have asked him to pay such a price, not for all the Champneyses dead and gone!  But Chadwick Champneys had held him to his bargain, had forced him to give his name, his father’s name, of which his mother had been so proud.

Peter smarted with humiliation.  It was as if he had been bought and sold, and he writhed under the disgrace of such bondage.  He felt the helpless anger of one who realizes he has been shamefully swindled, yet is powerless to redress his injury; and what added insult to injury was that a Champneys, his father’s brother, had inflicted it.

Yet he had no faintest notion of breaking or even evading his pledged word; such a thought never once occurred to him.  He meant to live up to the letter of his bargain; his honor would compel him to fulfil his obligation scrupulously and exactly.

“And so my uncle and I came to terms,” he told Mrs. Hemingway.  And he added conscientiously:  “He is very liberal.  He insisted upon placing to my credit what he says I’ll need, but what seems to me too much.  And so here I am,” he finished.