“No, Eliot. Nothing you said. I don’t wish to discuss Elizabeth any further, and I’m sure you would not want me to. Arthurlene has gone to bed, so you will have to show yourselves out.”

As baffled as they could be, they stammered their goodbyes.

“I’ve one request to make of you,” she said, just as they were leaving the room. “I don’t blame you for Elizabeth’s unkind—her ungrateful—comments, but please do not call on me again. Good night.”

“WE SURE DID get the bum’s rush, didn’t we though,” said Eliot as they started back to the wharves. “What do you reckon she meant, that we wouldn’t want her to talk any more about Mother?”

“Why do you always think I can read people’s minds?” Nathaniel asked, snappishly. Spurred by an agitation, he was covering ground in such long strides that Drew almost had to run to keep up with him. “And you, little man, if we ever end up at anybody’s house for dinner again, anybody’s, you’re going to keep your mouth shut. Couldn’t you tell that what you were saying was bothering her?”

“But she called me a liar,” Drew complained as they passed under the streetlamps on Bay, the yellowish glow illuminating clouds of insects buzzing in the humid night.

“Not exactly,” Nathaniel said. “I swear, sometimes you’re like a tone-deaf man in a music hall.”

In the main cabin, filled with the reek of cigarette smoke that fogged the gimbal lamp, Will lay on the settee, reading a newspaper. He asked how dinner had gone, and Nathaniel answered that the food was bully but he could not say the same for the conversation.

“Your great-aunt was not delightful company?”

“Never mind. What have you been up to?”

“Walked around, looked for diversion, found none. They roll up the sidewalks here before the sun goes down. So I thought I’d catch up on what’s been going on in the world.” He snapped the newspaper with a finger. “We are still fighting in the Philippines, and President McKinley still isn’t sure if we should annex them or not, and Mr. Mark Twain has added his voice to the anti-imperialists’ ”—the pages rustling. “Closer to home, an automobile killed a man in Atlanta, and right here in beautiful Beaufort, the telephone company is looking for tall women to be hello girls because they have long enough arms to reach the switchboard. Anything else you care to know?”

“How long does it take to grow a mustache?”

“Is this the beginning of a joke, Natters?” Will asked, fanning himself with the newspaper. The hatch and portholes had to be kept shut against the mosquitos, and the cabin was stifling.

“No, Nat is going to try to look more grown-up,” Eliot said.

“It’s that picture of our grandfather with our grandmother and Mother. He doesn’t have a mustache.”

“So?”