“Don’t let’s talk about it,” said Molly, as she took her eleventh ginger-snap from the plate; “we can’t help it, and we may as well look on the bright side.  Let’s write letters to each other this winter; shall we?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Stella; “I’ll write you every week, Marjorie, and you must write to me, and we’ll all send each other Christmas presents, and, of course ‘Breezy Inn’ will be shut up for the winter anyway, I suppose.”

“I suppose it will,” said Marjorie, “and I s’pose it’s time for us to go now; it’s six o’clock.”

There was a little choke in her voice as she said this, and a little mist in her eyes as she looked for the last time at the familiar treasures of “Breezy Inn.”

Stella was weeping undisguisedly, and with her wet little mop of a handkerchief pressed into her eyes, she could scarcely see her way down the ladder.

But Uncle Steve, who came across the fields to meet them, promptly put a stop to this state of things.

“That’s enough,” he said, “of weeps and wails!  Away with your handkerchiefs and out with your smiles, every one of you!  Suppose Marjorie is going away to-morrow, she’s going off in a blaze of glory and amid shouts of laughter, and she’s not going to leave behind any such doleful-looking creatures as you two tearful maidens.”

Uncle Steve’s manner was infectiously cheery, and the girls obeyed him in spite of themselves.

And so, when the next morning Uncle Steve drove Marjorie to the station, the girls were not allowed to go with her, but were commanded to wave gay and laughing good-bys after her until she was out of sight.

And so, all through the winter Marjorie’s last recollection of Haslemere was of Molly and Stella standing on her own little porch waving two handkerchiefs apiece and smiling gayly as they called out: 

“Good-by, Marjorie!  Good-by, Mopsy Midget!  Good-by!”