“There!” she said as I paused upon the topmost step. Her voice clattered in the hollow of her room, sounding the depths of that stillness around her. Few entered here but for her, and the room had acquired the pale demeanor and unpenetrated quiet of its single occupant, the attic chamber hanging above the House’s lower gaiety like a distant memory. I had been invited up here only twice before, and long ago, when as a child I delighted in visiting an “attic”; but this afternoon I walked the length of the wide chamber and drew in my breath with the sudden unexpected pleasure. Suffused by the afternoon light, the filmy curtains at the windows lifted and lowered as if keeping time to someone’s breathing. Here was a room in which a thought could hover and remain.

It ran the length of the house, a pair of high windows at either end where the roof came to a peak, so that when one looked out, one had the sensation of standing in the crow’s nest of a clipper ship. Indeed, standing at either of the windows gave an onlooker the full glory of a sweeping view: Out the front pair, one saw the wide swath of green lawn reaching down to meet the white rock of the shoreline, and thence to the sea; and out the back, the constellation of color shifted as the sky crossed the tangle of pine trees that formed the perimeter of the woods behind Grange House, the road to the town running along this edge like the crooked parting in a small child’s hair.

Against these back windows, and interrupting the oaken line of bookcases that formed the windows’ lower casings, was tucked Miss Grange’s writing table. On it lay a red copybook, her inkstand and blotter. There was a large dictionary open to the side. Four blue-and-brandy-colored rugs lay like little woolen pools upon the dark gray of the floor. At the center of the room stood the simple oak bed on which she slept, flanked on either side by the two chimneys of the House, dividing the attic into three separate spheres—beginning, middle, and end—three stations in which to pause: here to write, there to sleep, and, at the end, a place from which to stand and watch.

“Once on a time,” Miss Grange began, and I smiled. Sunlight flecked the slant wall behind her. I took a step toward her chair. “There was a family by the name of Grange.”

I halted. “This is a story?” I asked.

She nodded, her eyes never leaving my face, gesturing me forward, and I drew cross the distance between us to settle myself at her side.