Peter pondered this idea, and found it just.  Besides, he wasn’t unwilling to go back to America now that he didn’t have to face that girl.  He wondered, vaguely, what had become of her.  Had she found happiness for herself?  He hoped so.  Yes, he’d rather like to see New York again.  He couldn’t be of any further use here now, and he couldn’t do his own work, for all inspiration seemed to have left him.  He felt empty, arid, useless.

He might just as well act upon Hemingway’s suggestion, and find out how things were over there.  And after he’d seen Vandervelde, he’d go down south and visit that tiny brown house on the cove, and the River Swamp, and Neptune’s old cabin, and the cemetery alongside the Riverton Road.  It seemed to him that he smelled the warm, salt-water odors of the coast country again, saw the gray moss swaying in the river breeze, heard a mocking-bird break into sudden song.  A homesick longing for Carolina came upon him.  Oh, for the flat coast country, the marsh between blue water and blue sky, the swamp bays in flower, a Red Admiral fluttering above a thistle in a corner of an old worm-fence!

Emma Campbell discovered this homesick longing in herself, too.  Emma was hideously afraid of the passage across, but she was willing to risk it, just to get “over home” once more.  She thought of herself sitting in her place in Mount Zion Church, with ole Br’er Shadrach Timmons liftin’ up de tune, fat Sist’ Mindy Sawyer fanning herself with a palm-leaf fan and swaying back and forth in time to the speretual, and busybody Deacon Williams rolling his eye to see that nobody took too long a swallow out of the communion cup he passed around.  She thought of possum parties, with accompaniments of sweet ’taters and possum gravy.  Her lip trembled, tears rolled down her black cheeks.  She had been living in the midst of air raids, her ears had been stunned with the roar of Big Bertha.  Now she nevuh wanted to hear nuttin’ louder dan bull-frawg in de river so long as she lived.  She was sorry to leave Mrs. Hemingway, for whom she had acquired a great affection.  And she had one real grief:  Satan had gone to the heaven of black cats, so she couldn’t take him back to Carolina.  She wouldn’t replace the dear, funny, cuddly beastie with a French cat.  French cats were amiable animals, very nice in their way, but they weren’t, they couldn’t be, “we-all’s folks” as the Carolina cat had been.

Hemingway arranged everything.  And so one morning, Peter Champneys walking with a stick, and old Emma Campbell, stiffly erect and rustling in a black silk frock that Mrs. Hemingway had bought for her, turned their faces to America once more.