She stepped out of the shadow and onto the piazza, and I saw the terrible toll the past two weeks had taken. Now, indeed, she was paler than ever I had seen her, and shrunken slightly. My heart constricted for my old friend. Though she had been no relation, clearly Halcy’s death was deeply felt, and I thought such grief to be yet another testament to Miss Grange’s great spirit. I crossed the few feet between us and took her arm. She patted my hand, and we walked to the top of the piazza stairs and looked companionably together upon the view.

Down on the great rocks at the end of the lawn stood three or four guests idly fishing, their uneven heights a ragged echo of the chopping waves beyond. Scraps of their comments blew backward and up to us in single words, the only movement among them the lift of a wrist as a man shifted the angle of his line. Bart Hunnowell stood at the end of this line of men, neither fishing nor speaking, just regarding the water. Perhaps the flash of our dresses upon the piazza had caught his eye, for he turned round, and seeing us standing there together, he took off his hat and waved it in greeting.

Miss Grange lifted her free hand briefly in reply. And then, her eyes still upon the men, she said to me, “Come walk with me tomorrow, Maisie Thomas.”

“Gladly,” I answered, looking across at her, pleased she had not forgotten our little ritual, uncomfortably aware as I spoke that Bart Hunnowell still faced us, watching.

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER FIVE

It was always with Miss Grange that I took my first walk into the woods behind Grange House, and it was a satisfaction to find myself behind her, following her strict back, remembering the path once again as I stepped along it, carefully, and studiously, as if it were a line I retraced with my copybook pen.

Though Mama quailed at the dark overhung silence of this interior forest whose bosky corridors appeared to her unhealthy, I was not so faint. In here grew an utter disregard for place or decorum—the bright grass blazed from the backs of rocks and small roots sprung up through the dank mosses. A man on horseback might never find his way through, as the trees above leaned low and heavy across the path. Witches’-broom hung from the balsam boughs, which cast off pinecones tiny as a child’s thumb. Yet in me, the hush of these summer woods refrained—as the trees shifted, creaking in a slight breeze, the inner strings in my chest quivered back a reply. Familiar and foreign all at once, each shift in the path’s direction thrilled, as one thrills to the sight of a thing forgotten come round once more. Again and new, I trod on the damp moss thick as the best Persian spread upon granite.