I stood and drew to her window. The morning lifted slowly higher, drawing darkness from the waters until the harbor shimmered a reply to the down-turned face of that peach-and-golden sky. The first of the morning’s boats slid past Grange House pier in silence, the long double oars dipped in and pulled, dipped and pulled, past the breakwater and out to sea. How simple, how beautiful the dark boat passing by appeared. And the dark outlines of buoys upon the flat sea mapped a particular world of lobstermen, reefs, and catches, so the fever of those last words upon the page cooled in the dim calm. Here was water marked. Here, ordinary answers clung to the bottom of those long lines where solid weight and flesh slunk and snapped into the rope nettings resting there at the harbor’s bottom. I was a young woman. I was Maisie Thomas. I pressed my palm flat against the middle pane and leaned my brow into the clear glass.

As she had done. The thought flashed up and I shivered, suddenly made cipher—not Maisie, but an echo; not Maisie, just another, like Miss Grange, placing her hand upon the cool glass and looking out. I raised my arms to catch hold of either side of the window. A man’s harsh shout crossed the water. Small and blue, a second fishing boat approached, and in the stern stood a man waving—to me, the figure in the attic window. Had a girl started forward just then from the dark mouth of the boathouse and walked up the lawn, raising her hand in a small salute, I should not have been at all surprised.

Dazed, I turned back to where Miss Grange lay, and took up the book. Once more I opened to the pages, worn silky by the steady pressure of the writer’s hands—writing, reading, then smoothing them back. In the beginning, her penmanship was beautiful, the tails of the g’s and j’s curling deftly below the faded lines of the page, and not a crosshatched line to stem the flow. The tops of her letters tilted right, as though she could not keep from racing forward, one line pushing into the next and the next and the next! And then, almost imperceptibly, the writing changed, growing nearly illegible, and descending unto a kind of desperate slanted scratching upon the white—indeed, there were places at the end where the nib of her pen had torn cross the paper, wild dashes and exclamations cataracting through.

I raised my arms to stretch; and then I saw the words. Scratched into the soft old wood above my head, in the eaves slanting away from the window, were names; and I drew closer with a kind of dull smile, for I thought I knew what I should read. There they both were: Susannah Grange, b. 1847—; Amalie Grange, b. 1848—. I reached up my hand and traced the firm cursive of their names dug deep into the wide board, then stopped upon that final dash.