Robert Fielding stared with incredulity at this figure which had pursued him down the platform at Wyck and now seized him by the arm.

“Is it—­is it Anne?”

“Of course it is.  Why, didn’t you expect me?”

“I think I expected something smaller and rather less grown-up.”

“I’m not grown-up.  I’m the same as ever.”

“Well, you’re not little Anne any more.”

She squeezed his arm, hanging on it in her old loving way.  “No.  But I’m still me.  And I’d have known you anywhere.”

“What?  With my grey hair?”

“I love your grey hair.”

It made him handsome, more lovable than ever.  Anne loved it as she loved his face, tanned and tightened by sun and wind, the long hard-drawn lines, the thin, kind mouth, the clear, greenish brown eyes, quick and kind.

Colin stood by the dogcart in the station yard.  Colin was changed.  He was no longer the excited child who came rushing to you.  He stood for you to come to him, serious and shy.  His child’s face was passing from prettiness to a fine, sombre beauty.

“What’s happened to Col-Col?  He’s all different?”

“Is he?  Wait,” Uncle Robert said, “till you’ve seen Jerrold.”

“Oh, is Jerrold going to be different, too?”

“I’m afraid he’ll look a little different.”

“I don’t care,” she said.  “He’ll be him.”

She wanted to come back and find everybody and everything the same, looking exactly as she had left them.  What they had once been for her they must always be.

They drove slowly up Wyck Hill.  The tree-tops meeting overhead made a green tunnel.  You came out suddenly into the sunlight at the top.  The road was the same.  They passed by the Unicorn Inn and the Post Office, through the narrow crooked street with the church and churchyard at the turn; and so into the grey and yellow Market Square with the two tall elms standing up on the little green in the corner.  They passed the Queen’s Head; the powder-blue sign hung out from the yellow front the same as ever.  Next came the fountain and the four forked roads by the signpost, then the dip of the hill to the left and the grey ball-topped stone pillars of the Park gates on the right.

At the end of the beech avenue she saw the house; the three big, sharp-pointed gables of the front:  the little gable underneath in the middle, jutting out over the porch.  That was the bay of Aunt Adeline’s bed-room.  She used to lean out of the lattice windows and call to the children in the garden.  The house was the same.

So were the green terraces and the wide, flat-topped yew walls, and the great peacocks carved out of the yew; and beyond them the lawn, flowing out under banks of clipped yew down to the goldfish pond.  They were things that she had seen again and again in sleep and memory; things that had made her heart ache thinking of them; that took her back and back, and wouldn’t let her be.  She had only to leave off what she was doing and she saw them; they swam before her eyes, covering the Swiss mountains, the flat Essex fields, the high white London houses.  They waited for her at the waking end of dreams.