"Why, we—Sarah and I," said Peter, lingering fondly over the words which linked that beloved name with his own, "if we ever—if it ever came off—we shall naturally be away from home a good deal. I couldn't ask Sarah to tie herself down to this dull old place, could I?"
"I suppose not," said Lady Mary.
"She's accustomed to going about the world a good deal," said Peter.
"No doubt."
"Even I," said Peter, turning a flushed face towards his mother—"I am too young, as Sarah says—and I feel it myself since I have seen something of the life she lives—to become a complete fixture, like my father was. It's—it's, as Sarah says—it's narrowing. I can see the effects of it upon you all," said Peter, calmly, "when I come back here."
He could not fathom the wistfulness which clouded the blue eyes she lifted to his face.
"It is very narrowing," she said humbly.
"One may devote one's self to one's duties as a landed proprietor," said Peter, with another recurrence of pomposity, "and yet see something of one's fellow-men."
He replaced the eyeglass, and walked up and down the room for a few moments, as though he were pacing a quarter-deck. He looked very tall, and very, very slight and thin; older than his years, tanned and dried by the African sun, which had enhanced his natural darkness. Though he spoke as a boy, he looked like a man. His mother's heart yearned over him.
Peter had taken his lack of perception with him into the heart of South Africa, and brought it back intact. Because his body had travelled many hundreds of miles over land and sea, he believed that his mind had opened in proportion to the distance covered. He knew that men and women of action pick up knowledge of the world without pausing on their busy way; but he did not know that it is to the silent, the sorrowful, and the solitary—to those who have time to listen—that God reveals the secrets of life.