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.

And Susannah? I looked at the name of the girl who was rendered a proud beauty by her sister. Where was she now? Buried, I imagined, up on that hill in Middle Haven, next to Rorie and Cassie Grange, next to Hayden Gilroy, next to George—

Grange. Even the name palsied the comprehensible world. My hand rested upon those several thick cuts into the roof, and I had the uncanny sensation of standing inside a living thing: the House become a great body upon which was writ the names of all who had lived within. There was its face below; and then up here lodged its character, its breath and blood, the names tattooed upon the inner skin.