In the first dream, John came back. In this dream, she was watching for him at the front window, and when he turned the corner she went to open the front door for him, but then she wanted him to have his first glimpse of her framed in the window and she went back and stood in the window (holding the net curtain aside with her hand) until he saw her and smiled. When he got to the low gate that opened backward into her tiny front garden, she hurried into the hall to open the front door wide so that he could walk straight in and put his suitcase down in the hall, to get rid of the weight of it — he had never been very strong. Then they would look at each other and she would say, “I knew you’d be back, John.” Or she might put it this way: “I knew you’d come back to me, John.” And he would say, “You always knew what was best for me, Mother.” They would go down to the kitchen, where she would have the table set and ready, everything he liked on the table. He would eat something, and then he wouldn’t be able to hold it in any longer, what was bothering him, and he would say, “But Mother, didn’t you mind when I went away? Didn’t you miss me at all? You never said one word, not a word.” Those words would tell her what she wanted to know — that he had noticed her heroic silence, how she hadn’t said a word when she realized he was going off and leaving her, how she had kept back all the reminders and reproaches that she had been longing to let loose at him, and that he understood how brave and unselfish she had been, letting him go off free as she had done. There would be no end to the amount they would have to say to each other, once that point in their reunion had been reached. They would drink an awful lot of tea. She would tell him that she had missed him terribly. She would say that she had been dead lonely, even crying with the need of him (she would remind him that his father wasn’t much company), but that she had been only thinking of his own good, and only wanting the same thing that she had always wanted — what was best for him. And that she had never imagined not letting him go in peace, as long as his heart was set on it.