“Do not tweak me, Mr. Thomas. Susannah is the beauty in our family.” I picked up the bucket, wishing nothing more than to leave, but he put a detaining hand upon my arm. I looked at him.

“Stay, Miss Grange, I do not … tweak you.”

“Then why say such a thing when it is so preposterously untrue?”

He looked away impatiently. “Very well.”

I was pricked by his impatience into raising what should have been silent.

“What would your fiancée say if she heard you were paying compliments in plain view?”

He colored, then said quietly, “It was no compliment, Miss Grange.”

Well! What did one do with that? We stood awkwardly side by side in silence. But he did not move away.

“Tell me, Miss Grange.” His tone was lighter. “I have none, and you are so sure of yours—what is it to have a sister?”

I turned to face him, surprised. But there was no laughter on his lips, and I wished to step free of where we two had been, so I answered him, directly.

“A sister is one’s other half,” I offered.

He was silent, waiting.

“Or, say,” I continued, more for myself than the city gentleman beside me, “she is at once who I am—and am not”—I paused—“made visible.”

“And who are you not?” He watched me.

“Who are you who should know so much about me?”

“Nobody.” He held out his hand. “A friend.”

(Again, 30 drops)

27 September

When he appeared at first, I did not trust my eyes, for he was clothed in a suit the color of fog, and he moved through the leaning trees as easily as I.

“Stop a bit, Miss Grange,” he called to me. I waited for him to approach and amused myself by thinking him an apparition who, the closer it stepped, stepped into its living, breathing body; so when he arrived before me now fully clothed and slightly flushed, wan ether had turned to flesh.

“Hello,” I said. “For an instant, I thought you were not mortal.”

He burst out laughing at this, and the sound shivered the casings of the fog—what was dim become clear: We were a man and a woman in the middle of the wood.

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere in particular.”

“No destination?” he exclaimed in mock horror, his face alight. “No clear path? You undermine to the core what I thought to be the chief characteristic of a Yankee.”

“I am not a Yankee,” I replied breezily, and set off in the direction of the last gull’s cry.

“Ah,” he called to my back, “yes, I have forgotten. You are a figment of my imagination—the touchstone of my imagination—called into being by the fog.”

I did not turn, but spoke a little louder to send my words backward to him. “Your muse?”