In a Racicot winter much was made of small things . The arrival of Nora Shelley 's weekly letter to her father and mother was an event in the village . The post-mistress in the Cove store spread the news that it had come , and that night the Shelley kitchen would be crowded . Isobel Shelley , Nora 's younger sister , read the letter aloud by virtue of having gone to school long enough to be able to pronounce the words and tell where the places named were situated . The Camerons had spent the autumn in New York and had then gone south for the winter . Nora wrote freely of her new life . In the beginning she admitted great homesickness , but after the first few letters she made no further mention of that . She wrote little of herself , but she described fully the places she had visited , the people she had met , the wonderful things she had seen . She sent affectionate messages to all her old friends and asked after all her old interests . But the letters came to be more and more like those of a stranger and one apart from the Racicot life , and the father and mother felt it . `` She 's changing , '' muttered old Nathan . `` It had to be so -- it 's well for her that it is so -- but it hurts . She ai n't ours any more . We 've lost the girl , wife , lost her forever . '' Rob Fletcher always came and listened to the letters in silence while the others buzzed and commented . Rob , so the Harbour folk said , was much changed . He had grown unsociable and preferred to stay home and read books rather than go a-visiting as did others . The Harbour folk shook their heads over this . There was something wrong with a man who read books when there was a plenty of other amusements . Jacob Radnor had read books all one winter and had drowned himself in the spring -- jumped overboard from his dory at the herring nets .
And that was what came XXXXX books , mark you .
In after as at for like of over to with