“But Miss Thomas will take tea with me,” Miss Grange said over her shoulder, and reached the top of the stairs. Cook looked at the two of us standing there, and she grimaced. “Very well,” she muttered, but she stuck out the tray and gave it into my hands to carry. “Do not,” she added quite fiercely, “let her tire herself by talking.”

I nodded, quite liking Cook’s adamance. I would not tire her, I could see myself how weak she was. And I turned and followed Miss Grange, all the questions in my head hushed by the woman before me, now laboriously ascending the two remaining flights of stairs. When at last we arrived into her attic chamber, Miss Grange sank down into a chair pulled near the stairs, and as she rested, she motioned me to set the tea tray upon her writing table, then instructed me to pull two chairs close by.

When I had done what she asked, Miss Grange rose and slowly crossed the room to where the tea things lay ready. I sat down with mingled pleasure and discomfort. Here I was, alone with Miss Grange—and now what should I say? I watched her one hand dip and measure while the other moved slowly round the cups and saucers, holding them in place, her fingers alighting first here, then there. The foghorn at the tip of the breakwater announced a coming shift of weather. I stole a glance at my hostess as she poured the tea, and it was only Miss Grange after all, though illness had sharpened her familiar face and shaded the light in her eyes.

“Milk and sugar, Maisie?”

I nodded and accepted the hot cup into my hands. She did likewise, lifting her cup daintily in a salute toward me. I bowed my head in reply. I felt the old sense of peace I shared with her return—a peace now deepened by the pages I had read; and what I had seen in the woods did not seem dark as it had in the bright, unforgiving sunlight. For up here resided—I struggled for the words to describe the light, the opening silence, this feeling I had of expanding—something like: Severalness.

“Of what are you thinking, Maisie?”

Of what indeed? I opened my mouth to answer her, to tell her I felt I had begun to understand something. But what was I seeing? And how did it matter, when she was asking me perhaps for something I was not thinking at all. I strained against this harness: Mouth that could not say what I saw, Mind that could not speak, but only see.

“About your room. How glorious it is up here.”

She smiled, and I saw something other than my words had sent its arrow from the shaft. We drank our tea. I could not think how I should mention the diary. So the last thing I thought to speak bolted free.