“Susannah Grange blanched and looked down at her hands. Nell Grange looked hard at her, as if to force her sister to raise up her head again, but the elder remained in a mute and frightened silence.

“‘You see,’ said Nell Grange at last, ‘how we are all affected.’

“‘Aye,’ replied the doctor, and he rose to his feet. ‘Why not show me up to your mother, then?’

“Nell nodded and moved toward the door, and, taking his leave of Susannah, the doctor followed, crossing the wide hall to the bottom of the stairs, where Nell waited with a candle in her hand. Slowly, they ascended toward the landing at the turn of the wide oak stairway, and as they did so, the doctor could not help but notice that the old house had fallen into some disrepair: The blackened chimneys of the sconces gave assurance the lamps had neither been cleaned nor lit for some time, and from the ceiling of the stairway landing there hung several loose strips of rose paper.

“But the walls themselves spoke of more than disrepair, for upon the paper seemed to sprout small white blotches of mildew here and there, ascending in a sorry pattern of the house’s neglect. He shivered. Perhaps it was the chill and the quiet, but he could not shake the sense that he moved slowly within an unquiet mind, and that there on the stairs, the house watched his advance and had begun to call him softly to remark.

“Tonight, through the great window upon the landing, bright clouds streamed across the lowering dark of twilight.

“‘This is my favorite spot in Grange House,’ the doctor commented, pausing to stop before the window, where below, the dark calm of the harbor lapped upon the rocks. Beside him, Nell Grange had stiffened.

“‘You do not like the water?’ he guessed.

“‘How might I’—she did not face him—‘when my own father drowned down there? And he the one who had raised us on stories of other children falling into fissures in the granite on the shore, bashed and drowned by the turning tide; or when from here we heard for ourselves the terrible calls from the sailors on board the granite sloop Mary B., who foundered off the breakwater in winds so strong—do you recall?—no aiding boat could put in to save them.’

“He shuddered. ‘Yes, I do recall.’ An unnatural vehemence marks this woman, he noted—her slight figure turned, as if to punish herself, toward this sea, her face lost in that obscuring mass of hair.

“In my Father’s house are many mansions, she began to recite softly, and then stopped. He waited. ‘But if those mansions do look upon the sea, Dr. Bates, then heaven keeps a view directly into sorrow’s rooms, for no frame can protect against such sight as would make the eye wish itself blind instead of seeing.’