"It is a great pity to be eighteen, and it's a greater pity that your friends have to grow up," Rob said aloud, depositing the false front on the top of her collection in the clothes-basket, and recalling Bruce's expression when he left the little grey house on Sunday night to be ready for an early start to college Monday morning. He had bidden her good-bye with his old chummy pat on the shoulder, given with the finger-tips which protruded from the bandages of his right hand. All that he had said was: "Good-bye, Bobs Bahadur; you've been to me the trump you always are. I'll pour oil on the troubled waters for you if ever you get into trouble--hot water, I suppose I could more appropriately have said. I don't suppose I'll ever have a chance to tend you wounded, as you did me, because Bobs Bahadur is a general that doesn't know defeat, but I'll read to you if you are laid up, and return my obligations in any other way, if I have the chance. A wounded hero might have worse nurses than you and Wythie, and Prue, too, between her pursuit of knowledge." He had gone off laughing, speaking like a schoolboy, but though Bruce could control his tongue, and include Rob with the other two girls, he could not keep his eyes from regarding her with a look that told her there was only one girl in all the world for Bruce Rutherford. "Bother such nonsense!" ejaculated Rob impatiently, shaking her shoulders as she saw her clouded face in the gilt mirror, below the village green and the white cottages. "What nonsense, Robin?" asked Miss Charlotte's soft voice, and Rob turned towards her, glad for the moment that her cousin could not see her face. "Only growing up, being a young woman, Cousin Peaceful," she said. "I was taking down these trophies of my story-telling days, the absurd things Battalion B used to send me, and I was thinking what good times we used to have, and what a pity it was that we couldn't be boys and girls forever instead of sober men and women." "I haven't noticed any very great sobriety so far, Robin dear," remarked Miss Charlotte quietly. "Do you feel sorry to see the story unfolding for Wythie and Basil?" "Oh, I hate it! No, I don't!" cried Rob. "I'm glad about it, of course--Wythie goes on as quietly as if she were a little rosebud opening--sunflower, would be a better simile, because she looks up to Basil in the most sunflowerish way imaginable. But it is rather horrid, though it is nice, now don't you think so, Cousin Peace?" "I think Robin is not fully fledged yet," said Cousin Peace wisely, and Rob was silenced by the portentous little word at the end of her sentence.