III.

Every coast-line shows the destructive effects of the sea, for the bays and coves, the caves at the bases of the cliffs, the buttresses and needles, are the work of the waves. And this work is constantly going on. The knotty sticks so commonly seen on the beach are often the hearts of oak or cedar trees from which the tiny crystals of sand have slowly cut away their less solid outer growth.

In August of 1885, Henrietta was thirty-three and had been teaching high school for twelve years. Although her sister, Hester, was almost a decade younger, she’d married two years earlier and left Henrietta alone at home with their mother. This had suited Henrietta very well until her friend Mason Perrotte, an ambitious farmer whom she’d known for some time, began to court her attentively. Confusingly. Now, after seven months of thinking one way about this in the morning and another in the afternoon, she knew he was about to propose. She was fond of him, as was her mother. If she was going to change her life and start a family, it was surely time. But to leave her job, after all she’d put into it—no point to that unless she could do more work, not less, as Daphne had after leaving her own teaching job. And her mother’s argument that Henrietta would be teaching her own children wasn’t wholly convincing.

She and Daphne had shared a vacation every summer since they’d met, which didn’t always mean Daphne visiting Henrietta: sometimes Henrietta went to the little town in western Massachusetts where Daphne, having pried herself free from her parents and her brothers, had bought herself a tiny white house. And twice they’d managed to stay at a resort. Once in the White Mountains, once in Rhode Island: what luxury, to have their meals cooked and their rooms cleaned! Henrietta had been Daphne’s guest both times, which might have been awkward if, instead of pointing out that the income she made from her books was much greater than Henrietta’s small salary, Daphne had not insisted graciously that those books wouldn’t exist without Henrietta’s help, so the treat was simply Henrietta’s due. This year, having done especially well, Daphne had offered three weeks at the hotel on Appledore Island, a few miles off the New Hampshire coast.