"Walk right in and make yourselves to home. I guess you better leave the dog outside. Dogs track up a house so."
With a hasty apology for her thoughtlessness, Helen tied Leonidas to the fence. We entered the familiar little room with its horsehair furniture and the conch shells in a glass case, and sat on the very sofa where Helen had lain that evening with a wrenched knee. Mrs. Tyler disappeared in search of the milk. In a few minutes she returned with milk, a plate of cookies, and a jar of apple-butter.
"Kind of warm today," she rattled on, busy with her offering of hospitality, "but I guess we've got to expect a little hot weather in July. Milk's mighty refreshing on a warm day, 'specially if you been exercisin'. Help yourself to the apple-butter, Miss Helen. It's a good spread on cookies."
We sat and ate, grateful for her genuine friendliness. Her cookies would have taken a prize anywhere.
"Seems like it was only yesterday, Miss Helen, when you used to be in short dresses and drive out by here with your father on the way to the old cider mill. And to think of you gettin' married and goin' off across the ocean to live! Must be pretty hard on your mother to lose her daughter that way. 'Tain't as if you was to have your home across the street. I never had any children, so I ain't had to suffer. Sometimes I think it's a blessin' when I hear of the goings-on of the young folk today. Well, you never know how things might have been. Takes all my time to keep up with what is. It's the Lord's will, I tell Henery—He knows best. Take another glass of milk, Miss Helen. There's plenty more where that come from. Feed's gettin' scarce, though. It dries up in this weather."
We chatted awhile with Mrs. Tyler—perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we inserted with difficulty monosyllables at intervals into her monologue—and finally persuaded her to let us go.
A little further up the road we paused again at what we thought was about the spot where Helen's horse had fallen with her. We slid off our saddles and sat on the bank by the roadside, staring at the patch of dusty road where the miracle had been revealed to us.
"It seems years and years ago, Ted," Helen whispered. "I can't remember very much back of it. I just feel as if we had always known each other."
"In Avalon a day is a thousand years," I whispered back as she put her head against my shoulder. "Count up the number of days and see how many thousand years we have lived."
Deep Harbor lay in a smoky haze below us, and the lake beyond shimmered blue and silver in the July sun. The yellow road went straight down the hill toward the town. Across the distant fields the steam of a passing train trailed across the tops of the trees. I watched Helen's grey eyes staring at each familiar detail of her home—for the whole lay spread at our feet. The grey deepened and turned a little misty at last.