“I’ve been here,” Frances said. “Before… The row houses look the same. I wonder who lives in them.”

We were on an old brick street that followed the edge of the island. To our left, the river ran gold in the morning light. The row houses were on our right, a handsome old block of gray stone and long windows, glossy doors with brass hardware. We drove past. Trees hung heavy over the road and shrubbery grew up between them, making a dim green tunnel. Sometimes we saw an opening, with a dusty gravel drive; sometimes a house and yard behind the weathered pickets of a fence. Once three chickens scrabbled out of the road in front of us, scolding.

“It was always a little wild,” Frances said softly behind me. “But never so wild as this.”

I thought I knew what she meant. People lived here; but it was as if the land had gathered itself around them, veiling and swaddling them, hiding them and the signs of their habitation. If I hadn’t been on the outside of it, it might have seemed benevolent.

The car turned and nosed up to a peeling wooden double gate in a piebald wall of round stones and mortar. Ivy and clematis were turning the wall into a hill of shifting green starred with crimson. There was a flash of yellow on the other side of the gate, and it swung open to reveal an elderly woman in a yellow dress. She made a half bow to the car in general. The people in the front seat smiled at her. Since my window was one-way glass, I didn’t feel I had to.

Then we were on the other side of the wall; and if what we’d passed through was wild green, this was its civilized cousin. It was solid garden on either side of the gravel drive. There were fruit trees and flowering ones; the dense, druglike smell of mock orange and butterfly bush, strong even in the car; a mass of tall orange and yellow flowers like a streak of fire; grapes hanging heavy and green on a long arbor; the red cones of hot peppers set like jewels in their bushes. There might have been paths or terraces of grass, but I couldn’t see them from where I was.

And in the middle, a somber monarch in some highly ornamental court, was a three-story, sprawling wood-frame Victorian house. It was mostly dark green, trimmed in black, brick-red, and yellow. Once, maybe, it had been of modest size, before the gables and dormers and bays, the additional rooms and entire wings. It should have been awful; instead, it had a sort of rhythm, as if half a dozen dissimilar people had agreed to dress alike and dance in figures.

“I would swear,” Frances said, “this wasn’t here when I left.”

“How the hell long ago did you leave?”

“I know. That house is a lot older than I am. Still… ”

By that time, the car had stopped at the broad front porch, and the tri-wheeler had pulled up behind us. Mr. Lyle got out, the dog following with a great lazy spring, and opened the passenger door for the woman. He performed the same office for Frances, as his — employer? partner? — went briskly up the steps, the sound of her heels uncompromising on the wood. She turned at the top.