ns to pursue it.
In payment you marry Milly's niece."

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 astonis