In 1856, when Edwin returns from California, Rosalie is thirty-three years old. Re-occupying the house on Exeter entails a spate of housekeeping. November is not the month for these things, and yet the bedding is aired, the curtains washed, the rugs dragged out on the first sunny day and beaten within an inch of their lives. Mother, Asia, and Rosalie work together to polish the house back to their standards. Mother is interviewing candidates for cook and laundress. Someday soon, Rosalie will be a woman of leisure, or at least more leisure than she currently enjoys. In the meantime, she works.

Increasingly, Rosalie feels the need to talk with Edwin on a delicate matter. As she sweeps and dusts, as she runs the tablecloths and curtains through the mangle and returns them to the tables and windows, as she chops the vegetables and grinds the spices and flours the fish, she tries to plan this conversation. She will have to be alone with Edwin—this in itself is difficult to accomplish as neither Mother nor Asia is inclined to let him out of her sight. And then she must find just the right way to say what she wants to say. The Edwin who’s come home is bigger, louder, and more colorful than the Edwin who left. Rosalie is not fooled. Was she not, for many years, practically his mother? She could be blunt with this new Edwin if she didn’t see through his new clothes and mannerisms. Underneath, he is still that little boy with the big, sad eyes who never asked a question if he didn’t already know the answer. Rosalie has never done anything to hurt that little boy and she won’t start now.

It’s so wonderful, how he swooped in to save them all. He has every right to congratulate himself, although, Edwin-like, he’s just as prone to self-flagellation for not understanding sooner how dire the situation was. Why, he asks, didn’t anyone tell him? Mother too selfless, of course, but Asia or John or Rosalie herself surely could have written. So he’s already feeling guilty when there is no cause. Rosalie fears that he will seize fresh guilt from what she wants to say.

Which is this: Rosalie is worried about John. Edwin hardly knows him. He doesn’t understand how abnormally sensitive John is where his own shortcomings are concerned. And Edwin’s miraculous rescue wouldn’t have been necessary if John hadn’t failed so miserably on the farm. This doesn’t mean John’s not as relieved and grateful as the rest. He hated the farm. He’s well rid of it. Everyone knows that he did what he could. No one blames him for the year of trial and tribulation. No one except for John himself.