For a moment she repented -- she would stay -- she could not go . Then over the harbour flashed out the lights of Dalveigh . The life behind them glittered , allured , beckoned . Nay , she must go on -- she had made her choice . There was no turning back now . * * * * * Nora Shelley went away with the Camerons , and Dalveigh was deserted . Winter came down on Racicot Harbour , and the colony of fisher folk at its head gave themselves over to the idleness of the season -- a time for lounging and gossipping and long hours of lazy contentment smoking in the neighbours ' chimney corners , when tales were told of the sea and the fishing . The Harbour laid itself out to be sociable in winter . There was no time for that in summer . People had to work eighteen hours out of the twenty-four then . In the winter there was spare time to laugh and quarrel , woo and wed and -- were a man so minded -- dream , as did Rob Fletcher in his loneliness . 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 XXXXX 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 .
Nay People autumn letter letters messages moment places summer winter