will pay them," he said.
"I have no doubt that you did so intend when you incurred them;--and
that was perhaps natural. I will pay them; but for your own sake, and
for your dear mother's sake, I hope that they are not very heavy. Can
you give me a list of all that you owe?"
Young Peregrine said that he thought he could, and sitting down at
once he made a clean breast of it. With all his foibles, follies, and
youthful ignorances, in two respects he stood on good ground. He was
neither false nor a coward. He continued to scrawl down items as long
as there were any of which he could think, and then handed over the
list in order that his grandfather might add them up. It was the
last he ever heard of the matter; and when he revisited Oxford some
twelve months afterwards, the tradesmen whom he had honoured with his
custom bowed to him as low as though he had already inherited twenty
thousand a year.
Peregrine Orme was short in stature as was his mother, and he also
had his mother's wonderfully bright blue eyes; but in other respects
he was very like his father and grandfather;--very like all the
Ormes who had lived for ages past. His hair was light; his forehead
was not large, but well formed and somewhat prominent; his nose
had something, though not much, of the eagle's beak; his mouth was
handsome in its curve, and his teeth were good, and his chin was
divided by a deep dimple. His figure was not only short, but stouter
than that of the Ormes in general. He was very strong on his legs; he
could wrestle, and box, and use the single-stick with a quickness and
precision that was the terror of all the freshmen who had come in his
way.
Mrs. Orme, his mother, no doubt thought that he was perfect. Looking
at the reflex of her own eyes in his, and seeing in his face so sweet
a portraiture of the nose and mouth and forehead of him whom she
had loved so dearly and lost so soon, she could not but think him
perfect. When she was told that the master of Lazarus had desired
that her son should be removed from his college, she had accused the
tyrant of unrelenting, persecuting tyranny; and the gentle arguments
of Sir Peregrine had no effect towards changing her ideas. On that
disagreeable matter of the bills little or nothing was said to her.
Indeed, money was a subject with which she was never troubled. Sir
Peregrine conceived that money was a man's business, and that the
softness of a woman's character should be preserved by a
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