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How astonishingly bold she is becoming, she thinks.

“Is this how it is?” she asks him. “Is this the secret all men and women share?”

“Some have this,” he says. “Not all. Most men do. There are women who do not ever have this, who cannot allow themselves to have it.”

And Catherine, Olympia instantly wonders. How is it with Catherine?

“We cannot lie here,” he says.

They help each other up, and he kisses her. “I will take you to the cottage now,” he says. “We will sit in the sun, and our clothes will dry there.”

Her legs are wobbly, and she has to pull herself up into the carriage with her hands. Her dress is damp all along one side.

Haskell takes up the reins, turns the horses around, and heads in the direction of the new cottage. He reaches for her hand, which he holds in the folds of her skirt.

“You flirt with risk,” she says.

“It is not normally my nature.” He presses his hand against her leg. “Sometimes I say to myself that we must never see each other again, and I am resolved in this — ”

Her heart seizes up at this pronouncement.

“—and then, within seconds, I understand that such discipline will not ever be possible.”

They travel the length of the coast road, Olympia praying that they will not encounter anyone known to her. After a time, he draws the buggy up to the skeleton of the new cottage. Olympia can see that it will have a stunning view, with only the Atlantic for a front yard. He helps her down from the carriage and takes her arm. She wonders if her father is even now trying to see them through the telescope, if she now exists in its circular universe. Most of the cottage has been framed, and there are many places through which one can see the ocean. Olympia begins to imagine fancifully what it would be like to enclose such a house entirely in windows — to have light always, to feel surrounded by sand and ocean.

“I am not sure I have ever seen a house being built,” she says.

Together they enter the cottage and move through rooms that for now exist only in the imagination, rectangular and oblong chambers framed in pine and oak, forming a house that will one day shelter a family. She wonders how such a structure might be built, how one knows precisely where to put a post or a beam, how exactly to make a window. From time to time, Haskell murmurs beside her, “This will be the kitchen,” or “This will be the sun parlor,” but she does not attend him closely. She prefers, for the moment, to think of the house as ephemeral and insubstantial.

“This is the dining room,” he says when they have come to a stopping place that has been partially enclosed.

And she cannot help but think of the dozens of dinners he and Catherine will one day have in this room. Perhaps even Olympia might be invited to such a dinner and will sit where she is standing now. She shakes her head quickly and turns away.

“What is it?” he asks.

“This . . . ,” she says. “It is not important.”

“I should not have brought you here.”

“How old is Catherine?” Olympia asks.

“Thirty-four,” Haskell says tentatively.

“And how old are you?”

“Forty-one.”

“Do you have family? I mean, do you have brothers and sisters? Are your parents still living?”

“My mother is still living. My father is not. My mother lives with my sister in Cambridge. I have a brother who is a minister in Milton.”

A sensation, as though her chest were being squeezed, overtakes her. Why, she asks herself, the first of many times she will ask this question, must love be so punishing? Why, so quickly upon the heels of the moments of her greatest joy, must she be haunted with images that produce only pain: images of Haskell with another, speaking words that might have been saved for her, sharing intimacies that she can hardly bear to think about? Why, she asks herself, as she stands in this room that is not yet a room, does she have to imagine, in the greatest of detail, a meal Haskell will share not with her but with his wife? In his letter to her, he wrote that