“Once on a time,” she repeated, her hand dropping down to her lap, “there was a quarryman by the name of Rorie Grange, a man adamantine in both his passion and his fury, a man who could be gentled only by his wife, of whom he was inordinately proud. Yet his pride seemed to many to be oddly placed, for though the gentlewoman had lived among the townsfolk of Middle Haven for over thirty years, by them she was still considered somewhat curious: ‘Fremd,’ they called her—the old word doing best, as there was not a new word for her. That she had strode off a boat from Ireland, that she had soon after married the son of the richest man in town, that she had borne him two daughters and a son, that she had, furthermore, been midwife at many of their own children’s births did little to soften the stiff fabric of the town’s reserve.

“And her husband had done nothing during his lifetime to bridge the gap between his wife and his fellow townsmen, delighting instead in bringing back for her all the newest fineries from New York and Boston, to which he traveled often, and indulging her taste for printed matter of all type, feeding a voracious appetite for books and journals, even the odd almanac so she might chart—or cheat? some wondered—the weather.”

Miss Grange paused for a moment as outside a man shouted a greeting to a passing boat.

“Go on.” I spoke low, but I think she hardly heard me. Leaning her head against the chair back, she closed her eyes and continued.

“The son, George, had died tragically in a railway accident while down at Harvard College, and then less than one year later, Rorie Grange himself drowned one January night. The house appeared to retreat in its grief, and as the vital link that had stretched between this family and the town had snapped, the women of Grange House were rarely to be seen in Middle Haven, though often a fisherman sailing by the house on the point might catch a glimpse of one of them passing between house and sheepfold, or see a flash of one of their dresses crossing through the trees.

“Yet there were some who now suspected that a slow and fearful rot had gripped the foundations of that manse, creeping cross the sturdy granite. It was too silent suddenly, the fishermen remarked to their wives upon returning home, too strange. Then, too, the good doctor of Middle Haven had been said to receive a visitor to his surgery, and now a subsequent summons to Grange House itself. All in all, the good people whispered, the signs were not favorable.