On a particular Sunday Peter Champneys was making for his favorite haunt, the grass-grown clearing and the solitary and deserted cabin by the River Swamp. It was to him a place not of desolation but of solitude, and usually he fled to it as to a welcome refuge. But to-day his step lagged. The divine discontent of youth, the rebellion aginst the brute force of circumstance, seethed in him headily. Here he was, in the lusty April of his days, and yet life was bitter to his palate, and there was canker at the heart of the rose of Spring. Nothing was right.

The coast country, always beautiful, was at its best, the air sweet with the warm breath of summer. The elder was white with flowers, and in moist places, where the ditches dipped, huge cat-tails swayed to the light wind. Roses rioted in every garden; when one passed the little houses of the negroes every yard was gay with pink crape-myrtle and white and lilac Rose of Sharon trees. All along the worm-fences the vetches and the butterfly-pea trailed their purple; everywhere the horse-nettle showed its lovely milk-white stars, and the orange-red milkweed invited all the butterflies of South Carolina to come and dine at her table. There were swarms of butterflies, cohorts of butterflies, but among all the People of the Sky he missed the Red Admiral.

Peter particularly needed the gallant little sailor’s heartening. It was a bad sign not to meet him this morning; it confirmed his own opinion that he was an unlucky fellow, a chap doomed to remain a nonentity, one fitted for nothing better than scooping out a nickel’s worth of nails, or wrapping up fifty-cent frying-pans!

He walked more and more wearily, as if it tired him to carry so heavy a heart. Life was unkind, nature cruel, fate a trickster. One was caught, as a rat in a trap, “in the fell clutch of circumstance.” What was the use of anything? Why any of us, anyhow?

And still not a glimmer of the Admiral! At this season of the year, when he should have been in evidence, it was ominously significant that he should be missing. Peter trudged another half-mile, and stopped to rest.

“Let’s put this thing to the test,” he said to himself, seriously. “That little chap has always been my Sign. Well, now, if I meet one, something good is going to happen. If I meet two, I’ll get my little chance to climb out of this hole. If I meet three, it’s me for the open and the big chance to make good. And if I don’t meet any at all why, I’ll be nobody but Riverton Peter Champneys.”

He didn’t give himself the chance that on a time Jean Jacques gave himself when he threw a stone at a tree, and decided that if it struck the tree he’d get to heaven, and if it missed he’d go to hell but so placed himself that there was nothing for that stone to do but hit the tree in front of it. Peter would run his risks.

And still no Admiral! It was silly; it was superstitious; it was childish; Peter was as well aware of that as anybody could be. But his heart went down like a plummet.

He had turned into the grassy road that led to the River Swamp. The pathway was bordered with sumac and sassafras and flowering elder, and clumps of fennel, and thickets of blackberry bramble. In clear spaces the tall candle of the mullein stood up straight, a flame of yellow flowers flickering over it. Near by was the thistle, shaking its purple paint-brush.

Peter stopped dead in his tracks and stared as if he weren’t willing to believe his own eyesight. He went red and white, and his heavy heart turned a cart-wheel, and danced a jig, and began to sing as a young heart should. On the farthest thistle, as if waiting for him to come, as if they knew he must come, with their sails hoisted over their backs, were three Red Admirals!

Peter dropped in the grass, doubled his long legs under him, and watched them, his mouth turned right side up, his eyes golden in his dark face. Two of them presently flew away. The third walked over the thistle, tentatively, flattened his wings to show his sash and shoulder-straps.

“Good morning, good luck! You’re still my Sign!” said Peter.

The Red Admiral fluttered his wings again, as if he quite understood. He allowed Peter to admire his under wings, the fore-wings so exquisitely jeweled and enameled, the lower like a miniature design for an oriental prayer-rug. He sent Peter a message with his delicate, sensitive antenna, a wireless message of hope. Then, with his quick, darting motion, he launched himself into his native element and was gone.

The day took on new loveliness, a happy, intimate, all-pervading beauty that flowed into one like light. Never had the trees been so comradely, the grass so friendly, the swamp water so clear, so cool.

For a happy forenoon he worked in Neptune’s empty cabin, whose open windows framed blue sky and green woods, and wide, sunny spaces. He ate the lunch Emma Campbell had fixed for him. Then he went over to the edge of the River Swamp and lay under a great oak, and slipping his Bible from his pocket, read the Thirty-seventh Psalm that his mother had so loved. The large, brave, grave words splashed over him like cool water, and the little, hateful things, that had been like festering splinters in his flesh, vanished. There were flowering bay-trees somewhere near by, diffusing their unforgetable fragrance; the flowering bay is the breath of summer in South Carolina. He sniffed the familiar odor, and listened to a redbird’s whistle, and to a mocking-bird echoing it; and to the fiddling of grasshoppers, the whispers of trees, the quiet, soft movement of the swamp water. The long thoughts that came to him in the open crossed his mind as clouds cross the sky, idly, moving slowly, breaking up and drifting with the wind. A bee buzzed about a spike of blue lobelia; ants moved up and down the trunk of the oak-tree; birds and butterflies came and went. With his hands under his head, Peter lay so motionless that a great brown water-snake glided upon a branch not ten feet distant, overhanging a brown pool whose depths a spear of sunlight pierced. The young man had a curious sense of personal detachment, such as comes upon one in isolated places. He felt himself a part of the one life of the universe, one with the whistling redbird, the toiling ants, the fluttering butterflies, the chirping grasshoppers, the great brown snake, the trees, the water. The earth breathed audibly against his ear. He sensed the awefulness and beauty of this oneness of all things, and the immortality of that oneness; and in comparison the littleness of his own personal existence. With piercing clarity he saw how brief a time he had to work and to experience the beauty and wonder of his universe. Then, healingly, dreamlessly, wholesomely, he fell asleep, to wake at sunset with a five-mile tramp ahead of him.

Long before he reached Riverton the dark had fallen. It was an evening of many stars. The wind carried with it the salty taste of the sea, and the smell of the warm country.

A light burned in his own dining-room, which was sitting-room as well, and a much pleasanter room than his mother had known, for books had accumulated in it, lending it that note books alone can give. He had added a reading-lamp and a comfortable arm-chair. Emma Campbell’s flowers, planted in anything from a tomato-can to an old pot, filled the windows with gay blossoms.

Peter found his supper on a covered tray on the kitchen table. Emma herself had gone off to church. The Seventh Commandment had no meaning for Emma, she was hazy as to mine and thine, but she clung to church membership. She was a pious woman, given to strenuous spells of “wrastlin’ wid de Speret.”

Peter fetched his tray into the dining-room, and had just touched a match to the spirit kettle, when a motor-car honked outside his gate.

Peter’s house was at some distance from the nearest neighbour’s, and fancying this must be a complete stranger to have gotten so far off the beaten track as to come down this short street which was nothing but a road ending at the cove, he went to his door prepared to give such directions as might be required.

Somebody grunted, and climbed out of the car. In the glare of the lamps Peter made out a man as tall as himself, in a linen duster that came to his heels, and with an automobile cap and goggles concealing most of his face. The stranger jerked the gate open, and a moment later Peter was confronting the goggled eyes.

“Are you,” said a pleasant voice, “by good fortune, Peter Champneys?”

“Well,” said Peter, truthfully, “I can’t say anything about the good fortune of it, but I’m Peter Champneys.”

The stranger paused for a moment. He said in a changed tone: “I have come three thousand miles to have a look at and a talk with you.”

“Come in,” said Peter, profoundly astonished, “and do it.” And he stepped aside.

His guest shook himself out of dust-coat and goggles and stood revealed an old man in a linen suit a tall, thin, brown, very distinguished-looking old man, with a narrow face, a drooping white mustache, bushy eyebrows, a big nose, and a pair of fine, melancholy brown eyes. He stared at Peter devouringly, and Peter stared back at him quite as interestedly.

“Peter Champneys: Peter Devereaux Champneys, I have come across the continent to see you. Well! Here you are and here I am. Have you the remotest idea who I am? what my name is?” Peter shook his head apologetically. He hadn’t the remotest idea. Yet there was something vaguely familiar in the tanned old face, some haunting likeness to somebody, that puzzled him.

“My name,” said the old gentleman, “is Champneys Chadwick Champneys. Your father used to call me Chad, when we were boys together. I’m his brother and your uncle, Nephew and glad to make your acquaintance. I’ll take it for granted you’re as pleased to make mine. Now that I see you clearly, let me add that if I met your skin on a bush in the middle of the Sahara desert, I’d know it for a Champneys hide. Particularly the beak. You look like me.” Peter stared. It was quite true: he did resemble Chadwick Champneys. The two shook hands.

“But, Uncle Chad Why, we thought Well, sir, you see, we heard you were dead.”

“Yes. I heard so myself,” said Uncle Chad, serenely. “In the meantime, may I ask you for a bite? I’m somewhat hungry.”

Peter set another plate for his guest, and brewed tea, and the two drew up to the table. Emma Campbell had provided an excellent meal, and Mr. Chadwick Champneys plied an excellent knife and fork, remarking that when all was said and done one South Carolina nigger was worth six French chefs, and that he hadn’t eaten anything so altogether satisfactory for ages.

The more the young man studied the elder man’s face, the better he liked it. Figure to yourself a Don Quixote not born in Spain but in South Carolina, not clothed in absurd armor but in a linen suit, and who rode, not on Rosinante but in a motor-car, and you ll have a fair enough idea of the old gentleman who popped into Peter’s house that Sunday night.

Peter asked no questions. He sat back, and waited for such information as his guest chose to convey. He felt bewildered, and at the same time happy. He who was so alone of a sudden found that he possessed this relative, and it seemed to him almost too good to be true. That the relative had never before noticed his existence, that he was supposed to be a trifler and a ne’er-do-weel, didn’t cloud Peter’s joy.

His relative put his feet on a chair, lighted and smoked a cutty, and presently unbosomed himself, jerkily, and with some reluctance. His wife Milly and whenever he mentioned her name the melancholy in his brown eyes deepened had been dead some twelve years now. They had had no children. He had wandered from south to west, from Mexico and California and Yucatan to Alaska, always going to strike it lucky and always missing it. To the day of her death Milly had stood by, loyally, lovingly, unselfishly, his one prop and solace, his perfect friend and comrade. There was never, he said, anybody like her. And Milly died. Died poor, in a shack in a mining-town.

He had done something of everything, from selling patent medicines to taking up oil and mining-claims. He couldn’t stay put. He really didn’t care what happened to him, and so of course nothing happened to him. That’s the way things are.

Three years after Milly’s death he had fallen in with Feilding, the Englishman. Feilding was almost on his last legs when the two met, and Champneys nursed him back to life. The silent, rather surly Englishman refused to be separated from the man who, he said, had saved his life, and the two struck up a partnership of mutual misfortune. They tramped and starved and worked together, until Feilding died, leaving to his partner his sole possessions a mining-claim and a patent-medicine recipe. He had felt about down and out, the night Feilding died, for the Englishman was the one real friend he had made, the one person who loved him and whom he loved, after Milly.

But instead of his being down and out, the tide had even then turned for Chadwick Champneys. His friendless wanderings were about done. The mining-claim was worth a very great deal; and the patent medicine did at least some of the things claimed for it. He took it to a certain firm, offering them two thirds of the first and half of the second year’s profits for handling the thing for him. They closed with the offer, and from the very first the medicine was a money-maker. It would always be a best-seller.

And then the irony of fate stepped in and took a hand in Chadwick Champneys’s affairs. The man who had hitherto been a failure, the man whose touch had seemed able to wither the most promising business sprouts, found himself suddenly possessed of the Midas touch. He couldn’t go into anything that didn’t double in value. He wasn’t able to fail. Let him buy a barren bit of land in Texas, say, and oil would presently be discovered in it; or a God-forsaken tract in the West Virginia mountains, and coal would crop out; or a huddle of mean houses in some unfashionable city district, and immediately commerce and improvement strode in that direction, and what he had bought by the block he sold by the foot.

Because he was alone, and growing old, Champneys’s heart turned to his own people. He learned that his brother’s orphaned son was still in the South Carolina town. And there was a girl, Milly’s niece. These two were the only human beings with whom the rich and lonely man could claim any family ties.

Peter was so breathless with interest and sympathy, so moved by the wanderings of this old Ulysses, and so altogether swept off his feet by the irruption of an uncle into his uncleless existence, that he hadn’t time for a thought as to the possible bearing it might have upon his own fortunes. When, therefore, his uncle wound up with, “I’ll tell you, Nephew, it’s a mighty comforting thing for a man to have some one of his own blood and name close to his hand to carry on his work and fulfil his plans,” Peter came to his senses with a shock as of ice-water poured down his backbone. He knew it wasn’t in him to carry out any business schemes his uncle might have in mind.

“Uncle Chad,” said he, honestly. “Don’t be mistaken about me, and don’t set your heart on trying to train me into any young Napoleon of Finance. It’s not in me.” And he added, gently, “I’m sorry I’m a dub. I’d like to please you, and I hate to disappoint you; but you might as well know the truth at once.”

Uncle Chad looked him up and down with shrewd eyes.

“So?” said he, and fell to pulling his long mustache. “What’s the whole truth, Nephew? If you don’t feel equal to learning how to run a million-dollar patent-medicine plant, what do you feel you’d be good at, hey?”

“I’m good in my own line: I want to be an artist. I am going to be an artist, if I have to starve to death for it!” said Peter. He spread out his hands. “I have one life to live, and one thing to do!” he cried.

“Oh, an artist! I’ve never heard of any Champneys before you who had such a hankering, though I’m quite sure it’s all right, if you like it, Nephew. There’s no earthly reason why an artist shouldn’t be a gentleman, though I could wish you’d have taken over the patent-medicine business, instead. Have you got anything I can see?”

Shyly and reluctantly, Peter began to show him. There were two or three oils by now; powerful sketches of country life, with its humor and pathos; heads of children and of negroes; bits of the River Swamp; all astonishingly well done.

“Paintings are curious things; some have got life and some haven’t got anything I can see, except paint. There was one I saw in New York, now. I thought at first it was a mess of spinach. I stood off and looked, and I walked up close and looked, and still I couldn’t see anything but the same green mess. But will you believe it, Nephew? that thing was The Woods in Spring! Thinks I, They evidently boil their Woods in Spring up here, before painting ’em! The things one paints nowadays don’t look like the things they’re painted from, I notice. I’m afraid these things of yours look too much like real things to satisfy folks it’s real art. You sure the Lord meant you to be an artist?”

Peter laughed. “I’m sure I mean myself to be an artist, Uncle Chad.”

“Want to get away from Riverton, don’t you? But that costs money? And you haven’t got the money?”

“I want to get away from Riverton. But that costs money, and I haven’t got the money,” admitted Peter.

“I see. Now, Nephew, when it gets right down to the thing he really wants to do, every man has some horse sense, even if he happens to be a fool in everything else. I’ll talk to your horse sense and save time.”

Peter, in the midst of scattered drawings, and of the few oils backed up against the dining-room wall, paused.

“I could wish,” said his uncle, slowly, “that you were different. But you are what you are, and it would be a waste of time to try to make you different. You say you have one thing to do. All right, Peter Champneys, you shall have your chance to do it, with a price-tag attached. Do you want to be what you say you want to be hard enough to be willing to pay the price for it?”

“You mean to go away from here to study? To see real pictures and be a student under a real teacher?” Peter’s voice all but failed him. His face went white, and his eyes glittered. He began to tremble. His uncle, watching him narrowly, nodded.

“Yes. Just that. Everything that can help you, you shall have time, teachers, money, travel. But first you must pay me my price.”

Peter could only lean forward and stare. He was afraid he was going to wake up in a minute.

“Let me see if I can make it quite clear to you, Peter. You never knew Milly my wife Milly. You’re not in love, Son, are you? No? Well, you won’t be able to understand yet.”

“There was my mother, sir,” said Peter, gently.

“I’m sorry,” said the other, just as gently. “I wish it had come sooner, the luck. But it didn’t, and I can’t do anything for Milly, or for your mother. They’re gone.” For a moment he hung his head.

“But, Peter, I can do considerable for you, and I mean to do it. Only I can’t bear to think Milly shouldn’t have her share in it. We never had a child of our own, but there’s Milly’s niece.”

“Oh, but of course, Uncle Chad! Aunt Milly’s niece ought to come in for all you can do for her, even before me,” said Peter, heartily, and with entire good faith.

“You are your father’s son,” said Uncle Chad, ambiguously. “But what I wish to impress upon you is, that neither of you comes before the other: you come together.” He paused again, and from this time on never removed his eyes from his nephew’s face, but watched him hawk-like. “You will understand there is a great deal of money enough money to found a great American family. Why shouldn’t that family be the Champneyses? Why shouldn’t the Champneyses be restored to their old place, put where they rightfully belong? And who and what should bring this about, except you, and Milly’s niece, and my money!”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,” said Peter, and looked as bewildered as he felt. He wasn’t a quick thinker. “What is it you wish me to do?”

Still holding his eyes, “I want you to marry Milly’s niece,” said Chadwick Champneys. “That’s my price.”

“Marry? I? Oh, but, Uncle Chad! Why, I don’t even know the girl, nor she me! I’ve never so much as heard of her until this minute!” cried Peter.

“What difference does that make? Men and women never know each other until after they’re married anyhow,” said his uncle, sententiously. “Peter, do you really wish to go abroad and study? Very well, then: marry Milly’s niece. I’ll attend to everything else.”

“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?

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 astonished Emma Campbell, and stroking the cat, when Peter came swinging into the room.

“Well?” with a keen glance at his nephew’s face.

“Yes,” said Peter, deliberately.

The old man went on stroking the cat for a moment or so, while Emma Campbell, the hominy-spoon in her hand, watched them both. She understood that something momentous portended. Not for nothing had this shrewd, imperious old man whom she had known in his youth as wild Chad Champneys, led Emma on to tell him all she knew about the family history since his departure, years ago. When Emma had finished, Chadwick Champneys felt that he knew his nephew to the bone; and it was Champneys bone!

“Thank you, Nephew,” said he, in a deep voice. “You’re a good lad. You won’t regret your bargain. I promise you that.”

He turned to Emma Campbell:

“If my breakfast is ready, I’m ready too, Emma.” And to Peter: “We were renewing our old acquaintance, Emma and I, while you were out, Nephew. She hasn’t changed much: she’s still the biggest nigger and the best cook and the faithfulest friend in all Carolina.”

“Oh, go ‘long, Mist’ Chad! Who you ’speck ought to look after Miss Maria’s chile, ‘ceptin’ olé Emma Campbell? Lawd ‘a’ mussy, ain’t I wiped ’is nose en dusted ’is britches sense he bawn? Dat Peter, he belonged to Miss Maria en me. He’s we chile,” said Emma Campbell.

Over his coffee Mr. Champneys outlined his plans carefully and succinctly. Peter was to hold himself in readiness to proceed whither his uncle would direct him by wire. In the meantime he was to settle his affairs in Riverton.

“Uncle Chad,” said Peter, to whom the thought had just occurred, “Uncle Chad, now that I have agreed to do what you wish me to do, what is the young lady’s name? You didn’t tell me.”

“Her name? Why, God bless my soul, I forgot, I forgot! Well! Her name’s Anne Simms. Called Nancy. Soon be Nancy Champneys, thank Heaven!” And he repeated: “Nancy Champneys! Anne Champneys!”

“Uncle,” said Peter, deprecatingly, “you’ll understand I’m a little interested excuse me for asking you but what does the young lady look like?”

Mr. Chadwick Champneys blinked at his nephew.

“Look like? You want to know what Milly’s niece looks like?”

“Yes, sir,” said Peter, modestly. “I er that is, the thought occurred to me to ask you what she looks like.”

Mr. Champneys scratched the end of his nose, pulled his mustache, and looked unhappy.

“Nephew Peter,” said he, “do what I do: take it for granted Milly’s niece looks like any other girl nose and mouth and hair and eyes, you know. But I can’t describe her to you in detail.”

“No? Why?” Peter wondered.

“Because I have never laid eyes on her,” said his uncle.

“Oh!” Peter looked thunderstruck.

“I came to you first,” explained his uncle. “I gave you first whack. Now I’m going to see her.”

“Oh!” said Peter, still more thunderstruck.

“I’ll wire you when you’re to come,” said his uncle, briskly, and got into dust-coat, cap, and goggles. A few minutes later, before the little town was well awake, he vanished in a cloud of dust down the Riverton Road.