Before she died, she apparently also enjoyed Daphne’s Wonders of the Shore. She kept copies in the hotel library, and a personal copy, inscribed by Daphne, in her parlor; she gave others as gifts to cherished visitors. The hotel declined after Mrs. Thaxter’s death, as other, more modern resorts and hotels sprang up along the Maine and New Hampshire coasts, emulating and improving on the place Henrietta and Daphne knew—but all of them stocked Daphne’s book for their guests. Many visitors bought copies; teachers used it in their classes. Daphne built on that success with shorter books, more richly illustrated and less technical: one specifically about the seaweeds, another about the common shells. And when she arrived once more in the village, on an August day in 1901, she brought those, as well as copies of the most recent edition of Wonders of the Shore, as gifts for Henrietta, her sister, and her nieces. Marion, eight and a half by then, tall and round-eyed and particularly cherished after two stillbirths, took her copy as eagerly as a girl from a different family might have taken a new doll. Caroline, who was almost five, pointed at the title and said, “I can read!” Elaine, only a few months old, kept her thoughts to herself.

Along with the books and the rest of her luggage, Daphne also brought a large flat package wrapped in brown paper, which Henrietta noticed at the train station but then forgot to ask about. They cooked and ate a simple meal in the kitchen that still, two years after Henrietta’s mother’s death, seemed oddly empty; they went to a meeting of the Fossil Collectors Club; they went to sleep early. The next day they had a pleasant excursion to the Grove Springs Hotel, lunch with some visitors from Elmira, and then a hectic dinner at Henrietta’s sister’s house. Nothing out of the ordinary—Elaine, a fussy baby, was distracted by the company and slow to nurse; Ambrose was out at a meeting; in their father’s absence the older girls careened around the house as they vied for attention—but Henrietta, who came almost daily to help, was startled to see how uncomfortable this made Daphne. During earlier visits, before the baby was born, she’d been more relaxed and had even helped Henrietta put the girls to bed, but now she blushed at the sight of Hester’s breast and flinched when Caroline knocked a cup from the table, a dark stream of coffee shooting from the pale china shattered on the floor.

They left immediately after the pie, and when they reached Henrietta’s house, Daphne collapsed in a chair on the porch. “Sorry to be so feeble,” she said apologetically. “I’m not used to that much noise anymore.”