"But why? My good God! why?" Peter's eyes popped.
"Nephew," said his uncle, patiently, "you are the last Champneys; she is Milly's niece—my Milly's niece. And Milly is dead, and I am practically under sentence of death myself. I have got to put my affairs in order. I'd hardly learned I was a very rich man before I also learned my time was limited. On high authority. Heart, Nephew. I may last for several years. Or go out like a puff of wind, before morning."
Peter was so genuinely shocked and distressed at this that his uncle smiled to himself. The boy was a true Champneys.
"There is no error in the diagnosis, so I accept what I can't help, and in the meantime arrange my affairs. Now, Nephew Peter, business man or artist the Champneys name is in your keeping. You are the head of the house, so to speak. I supply the funds to refurnish the house, we'll say, and I give you your opportunity to do what you want to do, to make your mark in your own way. In exchange you accept the wife I provide for you. When I meet Milly again, I want to tell her there's somebody of her own blood bearing our name, taking the place of the child we never had, enjoying all the good things we missed, and enjoying them with a Champneys, as a Champneys. If there are to be Champneys children, I want Milly's niece to bear them. I won't divide my money between two separate houses; it must all go to Peter Champneys and his wife, that wife being Milly's niece." His eyes began to glitter, his mouth hardened. "It is little enough to ask!" he cried, raising his voice. "I give you everything else. I do not ask you to change your profession. I make that profession possible by supplying the means 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?