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his faith somehow intact, would be able to talk to people about God’s love. He could place a hand on top of theirs, and they would know he had suffered, like Jesus, in all points like as they had. Even Jesus, though crucified, got to keep His nose and His jaw intact.
    By mid-afternoon when Grace left the hospital, a cold sleety rain had begun, making the walk home far less pleasant than the walk down in the morning. Aunt Daisy met her in the doorway. “I have a surrrpriiise for you!” she trilled. Grace used to think “trilling” wasjust something writers said in books and not something a person could actually do with her voice, but Daisy disproved this theory. The trill, the glow on her round face, the word “surprise,” all effectively removed any possibility of Grace actually being surprised. She knew before she stepped into the parlour that she would see Jack Perry there, in uniform. Whatever made her gasp for breath at the sight of him, it could not possibly have been surprise.
    She wanted to go to him, for him to fold her in his arms the way he did that day she told him about Charley. But two years had passed. She had shaken Jack’s hand in farewell the day he left Catalina to go to St. John’s to enlist. Jack was her brother’s friend, nothing more. They had written often while he was away, the kind of friendly letters a girl wrote to her dead brother’s best friend while he was overseas. The sorts of letters hundreds of girls all over Newfoundland wrote, were enjoined to write, to keep up the spirits of the men at the front.
    In the past two years two young men had asked Grace to marry them; she did not think of Jack Perry as being in any way similar to those boys. He did not sign his letters with love or say that he was thinking only of her. He wrote about the things that happened around him, the men in his unit, funny incidents that punctuated otherwise boring days in the trenches. Daisy brought his letters to Grace saying, “Here’s another from your young man!” and confidently expected that Jack’s return would be a lover’s reunion.
    Jack put out his hand and she took it. “You’re looking grand,” she said. “It’s good to have you home.” They all sat down, Aunt Daisy perched on the edge of her chair like at any moment she might take flight and leave the lovers alone, if it weren’t for the rules of propriety.
    Jack was in uniform and he really did look grand. His slender form had filled out, shoulders broader, chest and arms more muscular. His face, though, was leaner, less boyish. Grace thoughtof Jack as having blond hair but it had darkened to a light brown. His eyes were light blue, very bright as he talked, smiled, laughed, turning from Grace to Daisy and back again. It was impossible not to compare him with Ivan Barry and the other men in the hospital.
    “You haven’t been home yet, then?” she said.
    “No, our ship only docked here in town yesterday. I thought I’d take the train out tomorrow, see Mother and Father and all the family. I wondered if—that is, would you like to come out with me? Have you been home lately?”
    “Oooh yes, Grace, you must, your mother would be so happy—” Aunt Daisy said, but was spared from explaining why exactly Lily would be happy by the arrival of the maid with a tray full of teacups and raisin buns, with rhubarb jam in a little silver pot. If she arrived back in Catalina with Jack Perry, would her parents jump to the same conclusion that Daisy seemed so happy to leap to? And would it please them?
    Lily had said no to the idea of Grace training as a nurse; she had turned up her nose last year when one of Grace’s old teachers at the Methodist College had suggested Grace could win a scholarship to go to college up in Canada. “A college education is no good to a young lady,” Lily had said. The obvious assumption was that she wanted Grace to settle down, be a wife and a mother. But when Abram Russell had asked her father for Grace’s