"'Remembrance' it says there," her mother explained. "That means you must never forget the little girl who worked it for you."
The red satin ribbon with the black embroidered letters nestled between the covers of her prayer book for many, many years. When on a Sunday at church she would open the book and let her eyes rest on the bit of ribbon, it carried her back in memory to days long gone by.
She sensed the odours of the sea and before her eyes rose a vision of boats and sea-faring folk—hardly the sea itself, but sea-shells and jelly-fish and crabs and star-fish and weakfish and mackerel. Then from some obscure recess of memory emerged the little red house in Karlagatan. She saw the bird of paradise, Fru Strömberg, the Jacob, Gray Island, Östra Hamngatan, the Uddeholm, and the three horses that drew the big carriage. And last, she saw the horses turn in on a large sward, surrounded by low red buildings and enclosed by a white fence. They stopped before a wide red house, with small windows and a little porch, and she heard all in the carriage cry as with one voice: "Thank God we're home again!"
The others, she remembered, recognized the place at once as Mårbacka, but not she. Had she been alone she would not have known what place it was. To be sure, she remembered her home, though until then she had never seen how it looked.
On the porch stood a little sweet-faced, slightly bent, white-haired old lady in a striped skirt and black
