We stood together like the trees, stiffly apart but rooted by my vision. For, though I did not ask—would not—I sensed I had imagined something true, a slight scene that the place had planted in my brain, made large, made sightly, by this moment and my companion, as if imagination were servant to suggestion, as if what were real had been pushed aside. Miss Grange said not a word. Passing above us, from far away, a gull cried, and the ordinary world folded in again around us, the sound repeating all the reassurances of a day in the woods in the summer in the sixth year of the last decade of the nineteenth century. The tips of our boots triangled out from under our white-and-gray skirts. We were two women, young and old, standing in the warmth of a July shadow, two light spots between the trees, a human clearing. Around us, the woods chattered and leaned. Between us, there was only silence.

“My mother made a terrible mistake once.”

Without thinking, I whispered, “I know, Miss Grange. I could see it.”

She turned her face to mine, brushing her gray hair back from her forehead distractedly, then rubbing the sides of her dress with her hands. Finally she crossed her arms over her chest and turned away from me.

“So,” she said. “You do possess it, Maisie Thomas.”

Her assurance made me slightly fearful.

“What is it I possess, Miss Grange?”

Still speaking to the air in front of her, she drew out the words slowly as a catch being pulled from the ocean.

“The capacity to see.”

“To see?”

“To imagine”—she turned now to look at me directly—“and so to recognize the hidden story, the hidden life that speaks in charms and whispers and will not show its face, save halfly.”

And without looking again at me, she stepped over the rocks that lay strewn between this place and the faint start of another path, where she turned. “Come,” she called to me then. “Come, Maisie Thomas, let us go on to the quarry.”

“Our task is finished here?” I meant to be playful now, not understanding my old friend’s sudden shifts in temper. She smiled and raised her stick. “Our task is finished here.”

And though I had the uncomfortable sensation that my playful comment was party to her own design, I fell into step behind her once again, reflecting as I followed upon the Miss Grange who seemed today twin-featured, her known and unknown parts walking before me in plain view as never before. But what she had meant by “our task” remained a question for the trees.