“Let’s be rude together,” he said, after introducing himself. He brushed off a chair and waved her toward it, seizing another for himself. “Let’s sit, and listen to the waves and the wind and Beethoven in the background, and relish the breeze instead of being suffocated by all the flowers and people crowded together inside. I haven’t seen you here before. What’s your name?”

She told him, and when he asked also told him where she lived, and how long she’d been friends with Daphne, and what they were doing there. He was from Newburyport, he said in return. A student of Appleton Brown’s—“those pastels behind the row of vases are his”—kindly included in Mrs. Thaxter’s invitation. He’d been sharing a small back room on the hotel’s ground floor with two other students for the last three weeks. “So it’s only fair I sing for my supper,” he said wryly, “in exchange for a place to sleep on this fine island, three excellent meals a day, and plenty of time to paint. Some evenings Mrs. Thaxter prefers to have just her intimates; other times, if a particularly eminent guest is passing through, she’ll put together a larger, more glittering group. If the guest list is more hit or miss, she’ll ask me and the other students to round out the gathering and be jolly.”

“Good thing Daphne doesn’t know where she falls on the list,” Henrietta said. He seemed to be in his late twenties: not so old that he’d object to sharing a room, but old enough to sense what that meant. Aware of how Mrs. Thaxter calculated his value. Was Daphne aware of hers?

Sebby shrugged. “Your friend’s interesting enough,” he said. “I can see how she’d intrigue our hostess.”

“It was good of her to invite us,” Henrietta said. “And I don’t mean to be ungrateful. But really”—she gestured at the scene framed by the windows—“look at them.” Three middle-aged women were gravely painting flowers in painted vases, two men were bent over an album of poems, Mrs. Thaxter herself was examining the mounted seaweed through a hand lens while a group stood around an easel watching a young man, perhaps one of Sebby’s roommates, render with gold and green pastels the moon’s trail on the water. All trying to convey, by their attentive expressions and postures, that they were also listening to the pianist still playing his Beethoven. All of them, including Daphne.

“You feel left out,” her new acquaintance repeated.

“I do not,” she said, more loudly than she intended. Suddenly the music stopped.

Mrs. Thaxter moved toward the nearest window. “Whatever are you doing out there?” she said, clearly affronted. “Mr. Quint, is that you?”

“My apologies,” Sebby said. “I stepped out for a smoke.”