More About Peggy | Page 5

see you again with the pigtail and the white frock, just as you looked that Christmas half-a-dozen years ago! Your father is right--you have not changed a bit from the little Peggy I used to know!"
"I'm a full-fledged young lady now, Major Darcy, and have been `out' for three whole years. I've grown into `Miss Saville,' or at the very least into `Mariquita.'"
"But not to me. I'm part of the old times; Rosalind's brother--Rob's brother--you cannot treat me like a stranger. Peggy you have been, and Peggy you must be, so far as I am concerned, for I could not recognise you by another name. Sit down and tell me all about yourself. How long have you been in India, and where are you bound for now?"
"I came out three years ago, when I was eighteen, and now we are going home for good. I'm so glad, for though I've enjoyed India immensely, there is no place like the old country. Mother is not strong, so we are going to stay on the Continent until it is warm enough to return safely. We shall land at Marseilles, stay a month in the Riviera, and gradually work our way homewards. When I say home, of course you understand that we have no home as yet, but we are going to look round for a house as soon as possible. We know exactly what we want, so it ought to be easy to get it. A dear old place in the country--the real country, not a suburb, but within half an hour's rail of town. A house covered with roses and creepers, and surrounded by a garden. Oh! think of seeing English grass again--the green, green grass, and walking along between hedges of wild roses and honeysuckle; and the smell of the earth after it has rained, and all the little leaves are glistening with water--do you remember--oh! do you remember?" cried Peggy, clasping her eager hands, and gazing at her companion with a sudden glimmer of tears which rose from very excess of happiness. "I don't say so to mother, because it would seem as if I had not been happy abroad; but I ache for England! Sometimes in the midst of the Indian glare I used to have a curious wild longing, not for the Country... that was always there--but for the dull, old Tottenham Court Road! Don't laugh! It was no laughing matter. You know how dull that road looks, how ugly and grimy, and how grey, grey, grey in rainy weather? Well, amidst the glare of Eastern surroundings that scene used to come back to me as something so thoroughly, typically English, that its very dreariness made the attraction. I have stood in the midst of palm and aloes, and just longed my very heart out for Tottenham Court Road!"
Major Darcy laughed and shrugged his shoulders.
"I know the feeling--had it myself; but you will lose it soon enough. In the East you gasp and long for England; in England you shudder and long for the East. It's the way of the world. What you haven't got seems always the thing you want; but no sooner have you got it than you realise its defects. England will strike you as intolerably dreary when you are really there."
Peggy shook her head obstinately.
"Never! I was ablaze with patriotism before I left, and I have been growing worse and worse all the time I have been abroad. And it will not be dreary! What is the use of imagining disagreeable things? You might just as well imagine nice ones while you are about it. Now Iimagine that it is going to be a perfect summer--clear, and fine, and warm, with the delicious warmth which is so utterly different from that dreadful India scald. And father and I are going to turn gardeners, and trot about all day long tending our plants. Did I tell you that we were going to have a garden? Oh yes--a beauty!--with soft turf paths, bordered with roses, and every flower that blooms growing in the borders. We will have an orchard, too, where the spring bulbs come up among the grass; and I've set my heart on a moat. It has been the dream of my life to have a moat. `Mariquita of the Moated Grange!'... Sounds well, doesn't it? It would be good for me to have an address like that, for I possess a strong instinct of fitness, and make a point of living up to my surroundings." Peggy lay back in her seat and coughed in the languid, Anglo-Indian fashion which was her latest accomplishment. "I suppose you don't happen to know the sort of house that would suit us?"
"Within half an hour of London? No! That is too much to ask. It's a