When the train bore her out of the station and into the sunshine of the unstricken world, a new, rare spring of happiness came welling up suddenly in her life. She had no definite thought of its source. She merely knew that somehow, undeservedly, she had escaped. The words passed through her mind: “Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken and we are escaped.” In spite of a voice of denial deep-buried in her, she saw herself in the image of a dove.

But it was with more than the wood-pigeon’s wildness that she was now spreading her wings. In her body she still grieved for Mario; but she was unbroken, and still hungry for life which was only beginning. Though she was going home, she was not going back – not going with the man from Edinburgh. Home was the next step forward; that was all. And now that she knew how ill-equipped she was, she must work. How she must work! As the train ran on through the singing fields, Joanna drank the sunshine with an overflowing heart. Like one who has done murder in self-defence, and is reprieved, she was full of honey-sweet defiance against death.

It was still early in the afternoon when she climbed down from the train at Viareggio.

For a moment she looked about her, lost. Had no one come to meet her after all?

Then she knew, for her aunt, an outlandish figure, came flying towards her from the far end of the station, as if on fawn-coloured wings.

The wings, on a nearer view, turned out to be the cape-sleeves of a buff dolman which had been fashionable ten or twelve years before, and which Perdy always wore on her rare descents to the town. As she ran to meet her niece, this garment fled apart in front, showing the coarse full skirt of a contadina, and her zoccoli clacked sharply on the hard track, as her heels in their thick, red-cotton socks parted from the wooden soles with every step. On her head was a man’s tweed cap, with the peak pulled well over her eyes. And under it her short hair showed, cut in a thick fringe.

Joanna immediately dropped her luggage and went blushing to meet her mother’s sister. And after Maddalena’s hundredth embrace Aunt Perdy’s first was like a home-coming. Was it the voice, the intonation, the sweetish odour of her breath, or something in the feeling of her arms, wondered the girl that made her at once so familiar? In Aunt Perdy’s face, with its strangely formed lips and burning eyes, Joanna could not see much likeness to her mother or to Georgie; yet it was as if she were hugging and being hugged by both of them; and by Linnet and Sholto too. She felt herself taken to the family bosom.