Peregrine laughed.  “My mother!  She has never seen aught but boorishness all her life, and any departure therefrom seems to her unnatural.  I believe she is as much afraid of my courtesy as ever she was of my mischief, and that in her secret heart she still believes me a changeling.  No, Madam Woodford, there is but one way to save me from the frenzy that comes over me.”

“Your father has already been entreated to let you join your uncle.”

“I know it—­I know it; but if it were impossible before, that discovery of Dante has made it impossibilissimo, as the Italian would say, to deal with him now.  There is a better way.  Give me the good angel who has always counteracted the evil one.  Give me Mistress Anne!”

“Anne, my Anne!” exclaimed Mrs. Woodford in dismay.  “O Peregrine, it cannot be!”

“I knew that would be your first word,” said Peregrine, “but verily, madam, I would not ask it but that I know that I should be another man with her by my side, and that she would have nothing to fear from the evil that dies at her approach.”

“Ah, Peregrine! you think so now; but no man can be sure of himself with any mere human care.  Besides, my child is not of degree to match with you.  Your father would justly be angered if we took advantage of your attachment to us to encourage you in an inclination he could never approve.”

“I tell you, madam—­yes, I must tell you all—­my madness and my ruin will be completed if I am left to my father’s will.  I know what is hanging over me.  He is only waiting till I am of age—­at Midsummer, and the year of mourning is over for poor Oliver—­I am sure no one mourns for him more heartily than I—­to bind me to Martha Browning.  If she would only bring the plague, or something worse than smallpox, to put an end to it at once!”

“But that would make any such scheme all the more impossible.”

“Listen, madam; do but hear me.  Even as children the very sight of Martha Browning’s solemn face”—­Peregrine drew his countenance down into a portentous length—­“her horror at the slightest word or sport, her stiff broomstick carriage, all impelled me to the most impish tricks.  And now—­letting alone that pock-marks have seamed her grim face till she is as ugly as Alecto—­she is a Precisian of the Precisians.  I declare our household is in her eyes sinfully free!  If she can hammer out a text of Scripture, and write her name in characters as big and gawky as herself, ’tis as far as her education has carried her, save in pickling, preserving, stitchery, and clear starching, the only arts not sinful in her eyes.  If I am to have a broomstick, I had rather ride off on one at once to the Witches’ Sabbath on the Wartburg than be tied to one for life.”

“I should think she would scarce accept you.”

“There’s no such hope.  She has been bred up to regard one of us as her lot, and she would accept me without a murmur if I were Beelzebub himself, horns and tail and all!  Why, she ogles me with her gooseberry eyes already, and treats me as a chattel of her own.”