Sybil imagines that Nathaniel must have steeled himself, during the voyage home, for a confrontation with Cyrus. He would have rehearsed the words he intended to speak, imagined those his father would say and the replies he would make. He would have pictured himself, standing firmly and as a man, demanding answers and getting them.

On August 20, 1901, the last entry was made in the logbook-cum-diary, and Sybil would have known it had been written by Nathaniel even if she didn’t recognize his handwriting: “Arrived New York City 1:45 p.m. Cloudy, muggy day—almost feels like Havana. Wired home to say we’re arriving by train this evening.”

And then she loses sight of them. Without the medium of the logbook, her vision of the past is obscured, the voices of her forebears as young men are stilled, their youthful faces vanish, and so she can barely imagine the way it was when they appeared at the Marlborough Street town house. She sees, vaguely, her great-grandmother, sitting in a chair with the martial brace to her shoulders and back. Elizabeth embraces her boys, kisses them, perhaps she cries, but she soon becomes the iron maiden again, restraining the joy of seeing her children alive and safe, for there are things she must tell them, difficult things, and she cannot allow her emotions to get the better of her. And Sybil hears her, oh so faintly, breaking the news that their half brother had been run over and killed by an elevated train in New York City, only the day before they had arrived there and talked to Mrs. Gleason, the boardinghouse owner. Lockwood had been drinking and had fallen off a platform somewhere in lower Manhattan, she whispers. And then comes the hardest news: Their father has left on an extended business trip.… But that, boys, is not the entire truth. Your father and I, though we remain married, have decided to live apart from now on.… And, no, please, please, do not ask me why now, perhaps I will tell you when you’re older, but please not now.… You will be seeing very little of your father from now on, perhaps you will not see him at all.…

How did the three brothers react to those twin shocks? Sybil wonders. She supposes Nathaniel felt cheated—now he would be denied catharsis, now he would not learn the meaning of the riddle in the telegram, now the drama that had been taking place on one stage while he and his brothers acted out theirs on another would forever remain a mystery. Did he demand from his mother the answers he sought from his father? Did he and Eliot and Drew insist that she tell them why Lockwood had been drinking so heavily that he fell off the train platform? Why their parents, who had seemed in love when the summer began, were now to live separate lives? They must have, but not with the insistence of modern adolescents. This was the late-Victorian era, after all, and the boys must have understood implicitly that something had happened which they were not to know, but there would have been another reason for their docility. They sensed, perhaps through their mother’s gestures, her expressions, her tone of voice, that it was something they would not want to know.