And there it was: the forlorn brown face of Widow Grange’s Telemachus staring back at me from the full bloom of a rose. With a sharp intake of my breath, I leaned farther down to examine the image. The brown eyes and curling hair set upon a little round face tipped in the direction of the cosseting flowers. And in tiny stitches below him was the legend: Find me, Father, for I am lost.

With a strange thrill of recognition, I whirled round toward the center of the room. I had descended the stairs into the memory of the House, held here in the curve of the pillows in the enormous birch chair by the mantel, there upon the cracking ivory of the piano keys. There stood the heavy old round table as it always did, covered with a mauve shawl fringed by beige tassels. I lifted a fold of the shawl to examine the tabletop—never uncovered, in my memory—and saw the marks and tickings of years and years of use before its decorative purpose in the present. Tracing the grooves and tiny scratches upon that table, I recalled the conversations I had read upstairs—words that had been written, here. Pressed here, like one of Susannah’s keepsakes, were the diary’s words, which beat softly now inside my head.

And for the first time that morning, there came to me a kind of quiet akin to privilege as I regarded my surroundings. Down here, the House did not importune; the furniture merely recalled within it the shapes of their backs and arms, the imprints of their hands. For they were here, all of them; here where the diary had set them into motion, crossing the pages to me—the sole deposit of their voices. At the table and at the piano sat the Granges of Grange House. And, though it were a cracked version, still it was my Papa at the mantel, standing with his back to me and delivering a swift kick to the log, then turning round and crossing time, come toward me. Me alone.

In the fresh gloss of that morning, the House had never seemed to me so beautiful, or so full. Softly, I walked through all the rooms downstairs as if my feet took possession: into the dining room, where the couple on horseback still kissed in midstride; entering the large library with its rows of shelves rising on either side of the great mantelpiece, upon which sat an antiquated pipe stand of fine black walnut; and back across the front hall and into the small sitting room for ladies’ writing. There was the secretary, and in it—I put out my hand to count—Susannah’s seventeen black scrapbooks carefully shelved, books I had never thought to open, though they had rested there before me all the while. And staring at the row lined before me, again I wondered what had happened to the sister who had gathered artifacts instead of stories to keep a history of her days—the sister who had been with Miss Grange when she had borne her child, and had led her to Perdita’s grave.