Amid the clatter of the serving of the soup, I studied Miss Grange across the table. Though she could not be more than fifty, the winter past seemed to have settled an elderly gray upon her cheeks, and a blue vein pulsed too brightly upon her hand. Papa was right. There was something shifted, for I do not think I imagined the heavy sadness deep down in Miss Grange’s eyes, now giving them the kind of deathly beauty of a poem: Pale beyond porch and portal, I repeated to myself, Crowned with calm leaves she stands. She caught my eye upon her and winked. I reddened and looked down. I have been reading too much Swinburne, I thought, and smiled to myself.

“Will you please to just look at that?” Mrs. Hunnowell breathed beside me, and I caught the erstwhile rose hip slip from behind her ear, to fall upon the broad pavilion of her bosom.

I followed her gaze out the side window, where, indeed, a fleet and incomplete tableau had formed of the sort the summer guests most appreciated. Now a man’s uncovered head leaned down to whisper into the ear of a young woman. From where we sat, the woman stood too small for us to see more than just the gentle swell of her forehead, though her hand had flown up to rest upon the back of the man’s neck.

And then in an instant, they had parted. But just as the young man turned, I caught sight of his face.

“Henry Brown!” I said aloud.

“But who is the girl?” wondered Mrs. Hunnowell, delighted. I did not reply. Yet something of the tilt of her head had called to mind Halcy Ames, I realized a bit wistfully, watching Henry Brown’s sturdy back and shoulders advance without haste down the lawn toward his boat, oblivious to the rapt attention we paid his small encounter.

I could not think of Halcy Ames without a twinge of regret, for once upon a time we had been staunch companions, though she was Cook’s daughter and I a guest. As a child, she had done light maid’s work at Grange House in the mornings, filling each guest room’s fireplace with new wood and making fresh the beds upstairs. Younger than I by two years, she was pretty in her way—tiny, her hands completing her tasks as efficiently as wood squirrels about their trees, and I grew accustomed to accompanying her as she went about the beds, fetching clean linens and smoothing spreads at her command.