The sight made Joyce want to cry.
"If I wasn't at home," she said to herself, "I should think that I am homesick, for I feel the way I did that day up in Monsieur Greville's pear-tree in the old French garden.

Then I was tired of France and everything foreign, and would have given all I owned to be back in America.

Now I am here with mother and the children, but still I am as unhappy and dissatisfied as I was then.

I wonder why!" It had been less than a year since Joyce had had that wonderful winter in Touraine with her cousin Kate, but it seemed such a long, long time ago, in looking back upon it.

She had settled down into the common humdrum round of duties so completely that sometimes it seemed to her that she had never been away at all; that she must have dreamed that year into her life, or read about it as happening to some other girl.
As she stood with her face pressed against the window-pane, the noise in the dining-room suddenly ceased, and Mary came into the kitchen, followed by the rest of the menagerie.