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!