When the formal invitation arrived, Mrs. Hemingway was delighted with what she termed Peter’s good fortune.  The invitations to that house were coveted and prized she explained.  Really, Peter Champneys was unusually lucky!  She felt deeply gratified.

Peter hadn’t known that there existed anywhere on earth anything quite so perfect as the life in a great English country house.  He thought that perhaps the vanished plantation life of the old South might have approximated it.  His delight in the fine old Tudor pile, in its ordered stateliness, its mellowed beauty, pleased his hostess and won the regard of the rather grumpy gentleman who happened to be her husband and its owner.  To her surprise, he took Peter under his wing, and showed himself as much interested in this modest guest as he was ordinarily indifferent to many more important ones.  It was his custom to take what he called a stroll before breakfast—­a matter of a mere eight or ten miles, maybe—­and he found to his hand a young man with walking legs, seeing eyes, and but a modicum of tongue.  He showed Peter that country-side with the thoroughness of a boy birds’-nesting, as Peter had once showed the Carolina country-side to Claribel Spring.  They went over the venerable house with the same thoroughness, and Peter sensed the owner’s impersonally personal delight in the stewardship of a priceless possession.  He held it in trust, and he loved it with a quiet passion that was as much a part of himself as was his English speech.  Every now and then he would pause before some rusty sword, or maybe a tattered and dusty banner; and although he was of a very florid complexion, and his nose was even bigger than Peter’s, in such moments there was that in the eye and brow, in the expression of the firm lips, that made him more than handsome in the young man’s sight.  Through him he glimpsed that something silent and large and fine that is England.

“And we’re going,” said the nobleman, pausing before the portrait of a gentleman who had fallen at Marston Moor.  “Oh, yes, we are vanishing.  After a while the great breed of English gentlemen will be as extinct as the dodo.  And this house will be turned into a Dispensary for Dyspeptic Proletarians, or more probably an American named Cohen will buy it and explain to his guests at dinner just how much it cost him.”

Peter remembered broken and vine-grown chimneys where stately homes had stood, the extinction of a romantic plantation life, the vanishing of the gentlemen of the old South, as the Champneys had vanished.  They had taken with them something never to be replaced in American life, perhaps; but hadn’t that vanished something made room for a something else intrinsically better and sounder, because based on a larger conception of freedom and justice?  The American looked at the cavalier’s haughty, handsome face; he looked at the Englishman thoughtfully.

“Yes.  You will go,” he agreed presently.  “All things pass.  That is the law.  In the end it is a good law.”