"I shall be here for some weeks every year, and I'll run down for a day or two whenever I can. It won't be good-bye." "I know--I know! but you will never be one of us again, living in the house, joining in all our jokes. It will be quite a different thing. And you will grow up so quickly at Oxford, and be a man before we know where we are." "So will you--a woman at least. You are fifteen in January. At seventeen, girls put their hair up and wear long dresses. You will look older than I do, and give yourself as many airs as if you were fifty. I know what girls of seventeen are like. I've met lots of them, and they say, `That boy!' and toss their heads as if they were a dozen years older than fellows of their own age. I expect you will be as bad as the rest, but you needn't try to snub me. I won't stand it." "You won't have a chance, for I shan't be here. As soon as my education is finished I am going out to India, to stay until father retires and we come home to settle. So after to-day--" "After to-day--the deluge! Peggy, I didn't tell you before, but I'm off to-morrow to stay in town until I go up to Oxford on the fourteenth. The pater wants to have me with him, so I shan't see you again for some months. Of course I am glad to be in town for most things, but--" "Yes, but!" repeated Peggy, and turned a wan little face upon him. "Oh, Rob, it is changing quickly I never thought it would be so soon as this. So it is good-bye. No wonder I felt so blue this morning. It is good-bye for ever to the old life. We shall meet again, oh yes! but it will be different. Some day when I'm old and grown-up I will see in a newspaper the name of a distinguished naturalist and discoverer, and say, `I used to know him once. He was not at all proud. He used to pull my hair like any ordinary mortal.' "Some day I shall enter a ballroom, and see a little lady sitting by the door waving her hands in the air, and using words a mile long, and shall say to myself, `Do my eyes deceive me? Is it indeed the Peggy Pickle of the Past?' and my host will say, `My good sir, that is the world-famous authoress, Mariquita de Ponsonby Plantagenet Saville!' Stevenson, I assure you, is not in it for flow of language, and she is so proud of herself that she won't speak to anyone under a belted earl."