“I give you thanks,” he said, “for you, also, had a share in the good work.”
“You must come aboard, Gustaf,” Fru Lagerlöf shouted from the deck. “The siren has sounded for the third time.”
At the very last moment two little girls ran up the gangplank and over to the Lagerlöf girls. They curtsied, shook hands, wished them bon voyage, slipped Anna and Selma each a parcel, then hurried ashore.
They were the daughters of the confectioner with whom Anna had played all summer. Selma hardly knew them at all, and was quite overwhelmed by their kindness in giving her, too, a parting gift.
Unfolding the wrapper, she found something very pretty—a strip of bright red satin ribbon, pasted on a bit of cardboard, on which there were some letters embroidered in black silk.
“It’s a bookmark,” Back-Kaisa said; “and that you should lay in the prayer book.”
“‘Remembrance’ it says there,” her mother explained. “That means you must never forget the little girl who worked it for you.”
The red satin ribbon with the black embroidered letters nestled between the covers of her prayer book for many, many years. When on a Sunday at church she would open the book and let her eyes rest on the bit of ribbon, it carried her back in memory to days long gone by.
She sensed the odours of the sea and before her eyes rose a vision of boats and sea-faring folk—hardly the sea itself, but sea-shells and jelly-fish and crabs and star-fish and weakfish and mackerel. Then from some obscure recess of memory emerged the little red house in Karlagatan. She saw the bird of paradise, Fru Strömberg, the Jacob, Gray Island, Östra Hamngatan, the Uddeholm, and the three horses that drew the big carriage. And last, she saw the horses turn in on a large sward, surrounded by low red buildings and enclosed by a white fence. They stopped before a wide red house, with small windows and a little porch, and she heard all in the carriage cry as with one voice: “Thank God we’re home again!”
The others, she remembered, recognized the place at once as Mårbacka, but not she. Had she been alone she would not have known what place it was. To be sure, she remembered her home, though until then she had never seen how it looked.