He turned to his wife. “I’m tired. It may or may not be the sea air,” he added, “but it’s a long time since I’ve felt so old.” Yet old as he felt, he also felt, unaccountably, a curious boyishness, a feeling of being again in his earliest teens.

Ethel, gathering her things together, said nothing.

On the pier, behind a fencelike gate, a mob of people in summer dress waited for the passengers to disembark. They stood silent but with a fixed collective smile and hands tentatively raised to wave at the first sign of a familiar face. It was as if the entire island had turned out to welcome the arrival of some illustrious personage. As the first passengers streamed off the boat, relieving the press on the stairway, Ethel and John Grandin went below.

Inching along toward the gangplank, he looked away from the island and out toward the farther horizon beyond. The sky was a pale white-­green, so remote that it looked like the static backdrop of a stage setting seen through the wrong end of a pair of opera glasses. Gulls flew and cried against the sky but no stir of life could be seen along the horizon. He was reminded of a dream he had had when a child, a beautiful meaningless dream he had never forgotten because of its pictorial beauty, which he had been able to see ever since in his mind’s eye and memory, and which was so much like this distant seascape now. . . . Shoulder to shoulder with ten thousand others he had stood on the top of a cliff rising out of the sea. It was a small rocklike island, high and flat, without beach or shore, rising straight out of the ocean. They stood in silence as if awaiting some portentous event or revelation, packed close together to the very edge of the cliff, their feet half buried in the long dry cliff grasses, while overhead birds wheeled and screamed in the late afternoon air and a cool wind blew in from the sea, across the island, and out to sea again. All around, to the farthest point on the horizon, stretched that remote panorama of white-­green and lemon-­yellow sky, with far-distant thunderheads piled up on the edge of the sea like rocks. . . .

A vast rickety omnibus with a high wide body quaked gently at the entrance to the pier. It was marked SIASCONSET.

Except for the broad back seat, the bus was already filled. They moved to the rear and sat down, and found themselves seated next to the Howards. Mr. Howard introduced the ladies; and then, as the bus began to shudder violently, he rubbed his hands together and said, “This looks like it’s going to be fun!” The bus moved off through the town.

Somewhere, from some tower, a clock struck.

“Eight o’clock, my god,” Mrs. Howard said. “I wonder if we’ll get anything to eat.”