After months in Italy, Paulina took Amala to her home in Spain, which was also located in a quaint village where people knew her and she knew how to enjoy the good and simple pleasures of life. Of Paulina’s three homes Amala had lived in, she decided she liked the one in France the best, although she certainly couldn’t deny the beauty and opportunities for enlightenment in each country, and she could understand why Paulina was drawn to such diversity in her life. She was like a grand and beautiful butterfly, flitting from country to country, spreading joy wherever she went and loving all people with the goodness of her giving heart. In fact, Amala came to see firsthand the way Paulina very carefully and privately managed to help those in need wherever she went. Amala now believed that part of her motive in spending time among the common people was to learn who was struggling and why, and she managed—with the help of Ivy and Miles—to find ways to anonymously assist them with food or money or medical care, whatever might be needed. Amala came to believe that this was the truest source of Paulina’s fulfillment and happiness. While she was seen by others as being a world traveler who was addicted to appreciating the good things of life, she was secretly spreading joy and relief to others, which in turn created a joy within herself that nothing else could.

Amala loved and respected Paulina more and more, and she enjoyed their time together. She had learned much about life and the world in the seventeen months since they had left England. And she had learned much about herself. She had felt healing in her heart and felt better prepared to face the rest of her life with courage, dignity, and a stronger sense of honoring herself. But she had also learned that she differed greatly from Paulina in the way she was coming to miss her home in England; she was a person who needed a home, one home. The traveling was nice, and she believed she would like to have times in her life when she would leave home for a time in order to experience new things and gain perspective. But she would always need a home to go back to, a home where she could stay rooted. And the more time that was passing, the more Amala was feeling the need to reconnect herself with the place that had become her home.