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.

She had found them again.

A gap in the green walls led into the flower garden, and there, down the
path between tall rows of phlox and larkspurs and anchusa, of blue
heaped on blue, Aunt Adeline came holding up a tall bunch of flowers,
blue on her white gown, blue on her own milk-white and blue. She came,
looking like a beautiful girl; the same, the same; Anne ha