“Hello, Jonathan.” I smiled weakly, but did not move, as if frozen to my stair.

“Hello, my love.” He held out his hand to me, smiling. “I had hoped to find you alone.”

“Jonathan.” I swallowed, but I could not take his hand. “Jonathan, I fear you think me very strange.”

“No, dear.” He dropped his hand. “A little tired perhaps. Your mother has explained that you sat up the night with Miss Grange.”

“Yes, and did Mama also tell you that I have a charge from Miss Grange?” I was suddenly unspeakably angry at Mama.

“No.”

“Miss Grange has asked me to finish a story. One she could not write.”

“Why would you finish a story of hers?” He had drawn very near to me.

“Because,” I answered, “because she was my friend.”

He put his hand upon my shoulder and shyly caressed it. “I should think you would rather concentrate on one of your own.”

In anguish, I looked up at him. “I think her story is my own,” I whispered.

He stared at me, speechless.

“Pardon me,” I gasped out, then fled, my skirts high in both hands, my face rigid, the only sound my heart beating to the tune of my feet racing through the passage to my door.

Once there, I collapsed upon my bed. A sob rose and burst forth like a foul taste, and there followed one harsh cry after another.

I woke in a shining darkness; a single long beam of light stretched through the window to me across the floor from the risen moon. I rose to stand in the window. The moon shone so brightly, there were shadows on the great white granite rocks at the shoreline, and the stretch of lawn appeared gray until it foundered at the water’s edge. Across the top of the boathouse, across the moon-brushed water, the tops of the trees on the answering shore etched a ragged line of black into that eerie, windless pale.

Some other light moved from out the doorway of the boathouse, the reddish glow of a cigar held in Bart Hunnowell’s hand, his form washed also to a chalky gray by that insistent moon. He sprang lightly onto the largest rock to the side of the boathouse, then walked down the broad ledge until he stood upon the ridge, his back to the House, facing out to sea. He paused for a moment there, and then the arc of his cigar’s red ember flashed briefly before it was swallowed by the watery gray. I leaned my brow against the cool glass of the window and watched him turn, cross the ridge once more, and leap down onto the grass.