I walked past him to the window and thrust aside the lace—and there the green lawn lay sunstruck by midafternoon. Hush, I thought to myself. Hush, said back the scene through the glass. Next to me at the window, he lifted the opposite curtain.

“My plot,” I said without looking to him, “would take me past the knob on that door, past the door, past the bourne of this house into …” I paused.

He had turned to listen, his hand resting between us on the sill. “Into?” he prompted.

“I cannot tell exactly, but I have a thought that if I listen low enough to the murmurs on a page as I am writing, I might push open a hidden door, an entrance into—”

“A better world?”

“No.” I faced him. “Do not tease, now.”

“I am sorry.”

“Well, I have no words for it.” I shrugged. “That is the struggle—it is not a romance, it is not a war, it is not a better world. I wish to write down all the possible layers.”

“All the layers?”

“Yes, all the layers of the world,” I said haltingly. “In them lies all that is true.”

He had moved very close to me, and I looked up into his face. What I saw there made me step backward, away from him.

“Close your eyes,” he instructed me. But I shook my head nay. We were quiet. And then he said again, “Close them. Please.”

I did so. Slowly. And I heard him approach, heard him stop very near. We were quiet. He drew in his breath then and said softly, “There are still other ways to travel past that bourne.” His lips were almost in my hair. Then sudden footsteps away from me, and the soft click of the latch as the door closed after.

30 October

The wind came up so fierce today, we could not walk, but sat in the front room all the long, droning afternoon, facing out on our dark Atlantic, while down at the water’s edge the pine trees bowed nearly into the sea, thrust over by this wind. Not a thing outside escaped this dry fury.

Mr. Ludlow Thomas said his mother would take to my unorthodoxies quite nicely.

“What is it about me brands me unorthodox?”

He turned and pointed through the glass. “When you look out this window, what do you see?”

The restless clouds roamed the sky. “Possibility,” I said.

“Precisely.”

“Why, what is it you see?”

“The evening star.” He craned his neck to catch an angle on the harbor. “That returning fisherman.”

“It is the same.”

He leaned his forehead against the window. “Would that it were, Miss Grange.”

We were seated on the broad window bench on the stairway landing, deep in the shadows of that place. Below us, I could hear Susannah and George laughing about something, and then, just under their voices, the deeper, slower voice of Hayden Gilroy.