"She's her grand-daughter," Potch replied.
He put the bucket down at the rails and stooped to get through them. Before he took up the bucket again he stood looking at her as though to assure himself that it was really Sophie in the flesh who was waiting for him by the fence. Then he took up the bucket, and they walked across to Michael's hut together.
Potch dared scarcely glance at her when he realised that Sophie was really walking beside him—Sophie herself—although her eyes and her voice were not the eyes and voice of the Sophie he had known. And he had so often dreamed of her walking beside him that the dream seemed almost more real than the thing which had come to pass.
Sophie went with him to the lean-to, where the milk-dishes stood on a bench under the window outside Michael's hut. She watched Potch while he strained the milk and poured it into big, flat dishes on a bench under the window.
Paul came to the door of their own hut. He called her. Sophie could hear voices exclaiming and talking to Paul and Michael. She supposed that the people her father had said were coming from New Town to see her had arrived. She dreaded going into the room where they all were, although she knew that she must go.
"Are you coming, Potch?" she asked.
His eyes went from her to his hands.
"I'll get cleaned up a bit first," he said, "then I'll come."
The content in his eyes as they rested on her was transferred to Sophie. It completed what the fragrances, those first minutes in the quiet and twilight had done for her. It gave her a sense of having come to haven after a tempestuous journey on the high seas beyond the reef of the Ridge, and of having cast anchor in the lee of a kindly and sheltering land.