Susannah slips loose each afternoon. I am so weary these days, I cannot watch her as I should. But today I mean to follow where she goes. Ah, there is Hayden Gilroy emerging from the boathouse. And there, behind him, is my sister. I must go.

He nodded once and then left her, walking straight up the lawn and past the house, toward the woods. She waited a few moments, looked about, and then followed after in his direction. Her slight, hurrying figure with its fugitive motions propelled me fast as I could after her. Something about the manner in which Hayden had nodded—the assurance, perhaps?—suggested a compact between him and Susannah that worried me terribly. Susannah moved deftly ahead of me, and I am grown so weary lately that I had a hard time of it behind her. I am struck again and again by her fleetness, a single-mindedness borne in her every gesture.

She neared the edge of the field and slipped between the new pines into the darker stretch of the woods. I followed at a distance, though I am not certain now as I write this that she was unaware. It would be like her to flaunt her secrecy. Deeper and deeper we wove through the trees, all hope of a path obliterated by the wreckage of the winds and the season. Soon, I saw where she led me. The whitened slats of the old blacksmith shop shone slightly out between the spindle trees.

When Hayden turned round at her approach and saw my sister coming to him, the great glory of his heart shone up into his smile and he stretched his arms out and she came running.

I cannot watch. I must tell them who they are.

30 March

At midnight, the ice in the harbor began to break up. We could hear the dreadful cracking from our beds. I crept to the window, but the glassy plate did not show its strain. Now in the warmer afternoon, the black waters border the unmoored icy chunks, like little cards of mourning floating past.

3 April

No one comes here to visit anymore, and today something curious has occurred. Hayden drove us into Middle Haven for some necessaries (his every move a caress of my sister, though they do not touch in front of me), and the two of us were packing the flour and sugar into the back of the wagon, Hayden being nowhere in sight. Suddenly I felt eyes on my back, eyes sweeping over me like warm hands. Trembling, I turned—but there was no one.

“Why, Hayden, you are shaking!” Susannah exclaimed. And I turned, to see our “cousin” strangely changed and standing quietly by. The rich brown of his face was suffused by hot scarlet.

“‘Tis nothing,” he said, and shook off Susannah’s sympathetic hand. Susannah shivered as if brushed by a wind, then pulled her cloak tightly about her, climbing into the wagon. No word was heard from any of us, each wrapped in our separate thoughts, the new green in the trees quaking above us, like women shaking loose their brushed hair.