I was glad to hear Captain Hitchcock refusing their offers of hospitality. “Can’t stop,” he said a thousand times. “Can’t stop. We got to get home.” The men, bent on making a good appearance, kept their eyes to the front; and the drum, echoing beneath the elms that arched above us, took on a resonance that seemed to draw us on more rapidly, as narrowing banks speed on an idling stream.

We left the village and came out into the meadows that lie above the river. There is a peculiar sweetness to this section of the world—some singular quality to the atmosphere, like that which gives the leaves their added brilliance in the autumn. The very grass has a perfume of its own, and the land is redolent of sea and pines; of strength and freshness.

“We’re almost there.” I told Ellen. “Look—around the bend—the red one! The red house! There’s someone at the gate!” I coughed, to show my coolness.

The drum made a triple flourish and the fife squealed Yankee Doodle, over and over. There were people shouting from the gateways and the paths—people who had known us from the days when we robbed cherry trees and ran yelling home from school. I would have liked to look at them and smile, but dared not, and so looked straight ahead.

The horse, of its own accord, stopped at our front gate, and I heard my mother’s voice. “Nathaniel!” she cried. “Father! It’s Nathaniel! It’s Nathaniel and Peter!”

I lifted Ellen from the chaise and set her before my mother and the girls. My mother fumbled uncertainly with the white collar of her dress: then spoke quickly to Jane and Susanah. “Don’t stand there staring! The yellow room! She’ll have the yellow room!”

She touched Ellen’s brown curls, a poignant reminder of how I had longed to touch them, just so, when first I had seen her, two long years before. Ellen’s arms went around my mother’s shoulders, and I turned away, with dimmed eyes and a brimming heart, to watch Hitchcock’s company swinging down the straight road that leads to the sea. Some of the men looked back and waved. They were a fine lot. Rabble, the English had called them. The spruce tips in the musket barrels were as straight and even as the top of a spruce wind-break. The fife and the drum seemed to repeat the word “Rabble” with derisive chuckles.

My father came to stand silently beside me. Neither of us, evidently, felt the need of words.