Nearly everything looked smaller or narrower or lower than I had thought, but I had forgotten how lovely they all were, lying so snugly under the hill and with the sea in front of them.

Our house alone when we drove up to it seemed larger than I had expected, but my father explained this by saying: 

“Improvements, gel!  I’ll show you over them to-morrow morning.”

Aunt Bridget (white-headed now and wearing spectacles and a white cap), Betsy Beauty (grown tall and round, with a kind of country comeliness) and Nessy MacLeod (looking like a premature old maid who was doing her best to be a girl) were waiting at the open porch when our car drew up, and they received me with surprising cordiality.

“Here she is at last!” said Aunt Bridget.

“And such luck as she has come home to!” said Betsy Beauty.

There were compliments on the improvement in my appearance (Aunt Bridget declaring she could not have believed it, she really could not), and then Nessy undertook to take me to my room.

“It’s the same room still, Mary,” said my Aunt, calling to me as I went upstairs.  “When they were changing everything else I remembered your poor dear mother and wouldn’t hear of their changing that.  It isn’t a bit altered.”

It was not.  Everything was exactly as I remembered it.  But just as I was beginning for the first time in my life to feel grateful to Aunt Bridget, Nessy said: 

“No thanks to her, though.  If she’d had her way, she would have wiped out every trace of your mother, and arranged this marriage for her own daughter instead.”

More of the same kind she said which left me with the impression that my father was now the god of her idolatry, and that my return was not too welcome to my aunt and cousin; but as soon as she was gone, and I was left alone, home began to speak to me in soft and entrancing whispers.

How my pulses beat, how my nerves tingled!  Home!  Home!  Home!

From that dear spot everything seemed to be the same, and everything had something to say to me.  What sweet and tender and touching memories!

Here was the big black four-post bed, with the rosary hanging at its head; and here was the praying-stool with the figure of Our Lady on the wall above it.

I threw up the window, and there was the salt breath of the sea in the crisp island air; there was the sea itself glistening in the afternoon sunshine; there was St Mary’s Rock draped in its garment of sea-weed, and there were the clouds of white sea-gulls whirling about it.

Taking off my hat and coat I stepped downstairs and out of the house—­going first into the farm-yard where the spring-less carts were still clattering over the cobble-stones; then into the cow-house, where the milkmaids were still sitting on low stools with their heads against the sides of the slow-eyed Brownies, and the milk rattling in their noisy pails; then into the farm-kitchen, where the air was full of the odour of burning turf and the still sweeter smell of cakes baking on a griddle; and finally into the potting-shed in the garden, where Tommy the Mate (more than ever like a weather-beaten old salt) was still working as before.