Faith climbed the last few steps to the manse's garret to find Jerry where she'd suspected. Leaning out the back window, a faint intermittent stream of smoke was emanating from his silhouette. Backlit like this against the Glen St. Mary dusk, she couldn't see the ways the war had aged her brother and he seemed almost as if he could have been the Jerry from back in their Redmond days.

"Mind if I join you?"

He must've heard her come up, as he didn't startle or for that matter even turn around, but rather shrugged and nodded as he continued to smoke and stare out the window. They were faced towards the hill of the old West house, across the section of rainbow valley that ran along near the manse. Faith stood next to him at the window a minute and tried in vain to find the ghost of the little girl that had first played there so many years ago. That she, and Jerry, and Una and Carl, and all the Blythe children from the rainbow valley days were the same young adults that had regathered in the Glen throughout this summer was difficult to parse. Almost as difficult as to remember that they were still indeed young adults, and that at twenty-four she might go on to live her lifetime to date twice, or maybe three times over.

"May I?" she asked, gesturing to the box of tobacco and papers on the lonely chair next to her brother.

At that, he finally turned, and gave her a sharp look, as if considering.

"I haven't unpacked my things yet, and the rest of mine are at the bottom of some pack or another I suspect" she explained, as she watched Jerry waver.

She suspected then that it was Second Lieutenant Gerald Meredith who gave his assent, not her older brother Jerry of the Good Conduct Club days. In turn, it was a cigarette she rolled as Faith Meredith, formerly of the V.A.D., not Faith the eldest daughter of the Presbytery manse.

"Will you really all go to Redmond in the fall?" Bruce Meredith asked Una, as she tackled the dishes from their dinner. Rosemary and their father had gone to call on Ellen and Norman Douglas for the evening, in a poorly disguised attempt to give the Meredith children some time to themselves. Carl was rocking forlornly on the front veranda, and Una suspected she'd rather not know where Jerry and Faith had escaped to. At eleven years old, Bruce was the only one of the five who truly remained a child, and Una had been sad to see the surprise in all three of her other siblings faces at even his height.

"I suppose we might well, Bruce," Una replied, although she knew full well that at the very least Carl's pilgrimage to Kingsport was far from certain, and she hadn't the least idea what Faith intended to do. Jerry, Faith, and Carl had all come back from Europe changed, in ways that Una suspected she might never understand. Her war years had been filled with a quiet, understated sort of heartbreak, but she hadn't lived all the violence that the others had. Her war years had aged her, and had deepened in her a stoic and calm resolve in the face of both relentless great tragedy and petty injustice. Still, she smothered a smile at the indignation on the as-of-yet-chubby face looking up at her.

"But then what shall I do?" he cried.

"Well, you'll go to school, and help father and your mother, and grow up, and then help build the new world that's been started," she replied, patiently, and willed herself to believe it would be as easy as all that.

Faith had finally returned three nights ago, the last of the Meredith children to return, and the last of the Blythe-Meredith children who would return. She had telephoned up to the Manse from Charlottetown around midday, and Una had picked up the 'phone:

"Oh good, I had hoped it would be you, Una dear," Faith had said rather hurriedly, "listen, suppose you could tell Jem I'll be in on the eight-o-four train tonight, and ask if he might meet me? I wouldn't presume to tear anyone else away at dinner time, but it would be nice to have a familiar face at the station."

If Una thought this bold and somewhat transparent, she didn't betray as much, although she did permit herself to hope against hope that nobody else had had their receiver down along the party line. She could hardly begrudge Faith her wish, and she knew as well as anyone that the manse line was shared with far fewer busy bodies than the line at Ingleside.

Later, she walked through the valley towards Ingleside, suspecting quite rightly that she might just as well find Jem there as at the house. He was sitting with Rilla near where they had used to fry fish in their early teenage years. Rilla and Jem had become quite chummy in the months he'd been back, and together they had mourned Walter, and kept faith as they waited for the return of the loves that the war had yet to give back.

She sat down on the log across from them and relayed the message from Faith to Jem. The smile that broke out across his face came slowly, and certainly. Jem Blythe had always been charming, had had a jovial sort of confidence that had reassured everyone around him, but this smile wasn't the roguish one of his Queen's and B.A. days. It was smile that radiated some bone deep satisfaction, and a happiness that seemed to come to him as if clicking something back into place, fixing one of the things that Una had assumed the war had permanently broken.

Rilla's smile was something else as well; quiet, private, perhaps a little indulgent. There was a happiness that she and Una shared, in watching Jem's excitement unfold. It was true that there was a gulf that could not be travelled between any of them, for they had all lost differently in the last five years; but there was also a patience for each other that in Una's estimation surpassed in value even the camaraderie of their youth.

"You'd better get some rest first then," Rilla said matter-of-factly, and added, after a quick glance at Una, "Would you like company up to the house?"

"I had a question to ask Susan or your mother about gingerbread," Una supplied quickly in the space that followed, standing up, never mind that it was still August and gingerbread wouldn't be called for for a number of months.

Apart from Jem's slow sigh, he seemed to accept the careful dignity the girls had handed to him in their light phrases. Rilla tucked her arm into his as they ascended the valley to Ingleside, and if she had passed behind him to his injured side, and if he did lean on her a little intermittently, they all ignored it with a proud Presbyterian coolness.

There had been a cigarette rolled already in the tobacco case, but Faith had pulled out two papers despite this, and rolled a short smoke in each. One for now, and one out of habit. She tucked the superfluous cigarette into the case next to Jerry's extra, and lit hers. She hadn't smoked since she'd gotten off the ferry in Charlottetown, and as she inhaled, she felt something unknot inside her. She'd gotten used to thinking of little more than the task in front of her at the hospital, and when she wasn't working she'd been thinking how to turn dreary nursing tasks into funny little episodes to send back home, and funnier little episodes to send out to the boys.

She'd been grateful to be in England in the last few years of the war; grateful when Jem was training in England and she'd been able to see him, grateful when Jem was fighting in France and she didn't have to wait for transatlantic letters from him, and even grateful when he was missing for those long, long months. That was a grateful to be busy, a grateful she hadn't known she could be. That someone needed her, even if it was just the hospital matron, and even, especially, if she was needed not as Faith Meredith, B.A, of the Glen St. Mary, but simply needed as a set of reliable hands for jobs too beneath those of trained medical professionals.

As it stood, she wasn't sure anymore how to be Faith Meredith, B.A., of the Glen St. Mary.

Her first night, Jem had been at the station just as she'd asked. He was stronger than he had been when she'd last seen him, right before he got on a boat back to Canada, as she'd hoped. He wasn't back-to-normal in the way he'd assured her by letter, but she'd known that wasn't to be the case before she'd seen them. The letters that had held the two together in the last five years had been far less censored than her letters to everyone else, but it was still possible to write hopes as if they were truths.

They'd gone to the manse first, and then Ingleside, and both welcomes had held their discordant moments. She'd been surprised how much harder Carl's eyepatch was to take in once safe on PEI soil than it had been in the hospitals of England. In the convalescent ward where she'd visited him, she'd been glad for his other eye, and for his mobility and safety and life. There had been a huge number of men wounded worse than he was in his ward, and so many more still out there in harms way. But in the shadowy manse hallway, the violence of his injury was so much clearer to Faith. She realised as she looked between Carl, Jerry, and Jem that Shirley was the only one of their boys who hadn't been wounded.

Before spring 1917, she'd kept house with the twins through three lonely war winters in Kingsport, but she hadn't seen them since Di had been forbidden to accompany her to join the V.A.D. On the train to the Glen, she'd worried most about feeling awkward around them, the two who she'd held vigil with for so much of the war. Her last two years serving had dwarfed the years that had proceeded them entirely. In the years that followed, she'd recognise anew the pain inflicted by the quiet unending provincial tedium of the war on the women who stayed behind, but initially this acknowledgement was almost academic. The meeting had been pleasant nonetheless, and there had been genuine happiness in both reunions. Still, Faith, as she had worried, had felt quiet at-odds a fair few times throughout the evening, and the days that had followed.

In England, Faith had felt like Andromache. In Canada, she felt more like Hector, had he returned for that bath after all.