“How queerly things work out sometimes, for no sooner had I emerged from the fields on to the cross-roads, where the finger-post says ‘Edenbridge, Leigh, Cowden,’ still wrapped in my loneliness as in a cloak, I came upon Mrs. Pennistan walking slowly up and down, waiting, I presumed, for Amos. At the sight of me she stopped and stared, till we simultaneously cried one another’s names. I was filled with real warm gladness on seeing her there unchanged, unchangeable, and I went forward with my hands outstretched to clasp her fat, soft hands—do you remember her hands? they spoke of innumerable kneadings of dough, and she had no knuckles, only dimples where the knuckles should have been. And then, before I knew what had happened, that good woman’s arms were round my neck and her soft, jolly face was against mine, and she kissed me and I kissed her, and I swear there were tears in her eyes, which, for that matter, she didn’t trouble to conceal. “Presently Amos came along. I had intended returning to London that night, but they would hear nothing of it, and I found myself supping as of old in their happy kitchen, and going upstairs later to that bare little room which had once been mine and had since been yours. It is a real satisfaction to me that you should be as familiar with these surroundings as I am myself, for you have, as you read, the same picture as I have as I write, and this harmony we could never achieve were I telling you of places and faces you had never seen. “We talked, naturally, of you, for after the manner of old friends we travelled from one to the other of persons we had known. The sons, who were there solemnly munching, lent a certain constraint to the evening. And I missed so poignantly, so unexpectedly, the figure of the old woman by the fire. I had not realised until then what a prominent figure it had been, although so tiny and so silent, bent over the eternal chestnuts, the great-great grandmother of the little Westmacotts. Will you smile if I tell you that I took the diary up to bed with me, and read myself again into the underworld of Spain? “Was it you, by the way, that drew a charcoal portrait of me over the wash-stand in my room? * * * * *