After some further discussion Peregrine remounted his horse, and rode back to The Cleeve, not quite satisfied with young Mason.
'If you do speak to her,—to my mother, do it gently.' Those were the last words whispered by Lucius as Peregrine Orme had his foot in the stirrup.
Young Peregrine Orme, as he rode home, felt that the world was using him very unkindly. Everything was going wrong with him, and an idea entered his head that he might as well go and look for Sir John Franklin at the North Pole, or join some energetic traveller in the middle of Central Africa. He had proposed to Madeline Staveley and had been refused. That in itself caused a load to lie on his heart which was almost unendurable;—and now his grandfather was going to disgrace himself. He had made his little effort to be respectable and discreet, devoting himself to the county hunt and county drawing-rooms, giving up the pleasures of London and the glories of dissipation. And for what?
Then Peregrine began to argue within himself as some others have done before him—
'Were it not better done as others use———' he said to himself, in that or other language; and as he rode slowly into the courtyard of The Cleeve, he thought almost with regret of his old friend Carroty Bob.
