The Hemingways insisted that Peter should spend some time in England.  Mrs. Hemingway was going over to Paris presently, and he could accompany her.  In the meantime she wanted him to meet certain English friends of hers.  Peter was perfectly willing to wait.  He was enchanted with London, and although he would have preferred to be turned foot-loose to prowl indefinitely, his affection for Mrs. Hemingway made him amenable to her discipline.  At her command he went with Hemingway to the latter’s tailor.  To please her he duteously obeyed Hemingway’s fastidious instructions as to habiliments.  He overcame his rooted aversion to meeting strangers, and when bidden appeared in her drawing-room, and there met smart, clever, and noted London.

Hemingway thereafter marked his progress with amusement not unmixed with amazement.  It came to him that there was a greater difference, a deeper divergence between himself and Peter than between Peter and these Britishers.  The earmark of your coast-born South Carolinian is the selfsame, absolute sureness of himself, his place, his people, in the essential scheme of things.  Wasn’t he born in South Carolina?  Hasn’t he relatives in Charleston?  Very well, then!

In Peter’s case this essential sureness had developed into a courtesy so instinctive, a democracy so unaffectedly sincere, that it flavored his whole personality with a pleasing distinctiveness.  The British do not expect their very young men to be too knowing or too fatally bright; they mark the promise rather than the performance of youth, and spaciously allow time for the process of development.  And so Peter Champneys found himself curiously at home in democratically oligarchic England.

“I feel as if I were visiting my grandmother’s house,” he confided to a certain lady next whom he was seated at one of Mrs. Hemingway’s small dinners.

“And where is your mother’s house?” wondered the lady, who found herself attracted to him.

“Over home in Riverton,” said Peter Champneys.  And his face went wistful, remembering the little town with the tide-water gurgling in its coves, and its great oaks hung with long gray swaying moss, and the sinuous lines of the marshes against sky and water, and the smell of the sea—­all the mellow magic of the coast that was Home.  It didn’t occur to him that an English lady mightn’t know just where “over home in Riverton” might be.  She was so great a lady that she didn’t ask.  She looked at him and said thoughtfully: 

“I wonder if you wouldn’t like to see an old place of ours.  I’m having the Hemingways down for a week, and I should like you to come with them.”  And she added, with a charming smile:  “As you are an artist, you’ll like our gallery.  There’s a Rembrandt you should see.”

Peter’s eyes of a sudden went deep and golden, and their dazzling depths had so instant and so sweet a recognition that her heart leaped in answer.  It was as if a young archangel had secretly signaled her in passing.