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 I imagine 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 

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