Newland felt a current of electricity shoot down his spine, cross his loins, and then burst through his manhood. With a cataclysmic jolt, he spilled his seed, filling her with his greatest joy.

They collapsed into one another’s arms, rolled to their sides, and began laughing with complete satisfaction.

When they dressed, Newland left the room before she did, so as to avoid any appearance of impropriety and waited for her outside the hotel on the sidewalk. His heart was filled with insurmountable joy and the day was only beginning. He would have her all to himself. Alone.

The doors swung open again and she was at his side once again. They got into the herdic, and as it drove off he took out his watch and saw that she had been absent just three minutes from the moment he left her side. In the clatter of loose windows that made talk impossible they bumped over the disjointed cobblestones to the wharf.

Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their release and their isolation. They had made love and now life was utterly complete just as Newland had dreamed it should be. If this day lasted forever, he would not complain.

As the paddle-wheels began to turn, and wharves and shipping to recede through the veil of heat, it seemed to Archer that everything in the old familiar world of habit was receding also. He longed to ask Madame Olenska if she did not have the same feeling: the feeling that they were starting on some long voyage from which they might never return. But he was afraid to say it, or anything else that might disturb the delicate balance of her trust in him. In reality he had no wish to betray that trust. There had been days and nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting forth into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper nearness that a touch may sunder.

As the boat left the harbour and turned seaward a breeze stirred about them and the bay broke up into long oily undulations, then into ripples tipped with spray. The fog of sultriness still hung over the city, but ahead lay a fresh world of ruffled waters, and distant promontories with light-houses in the sun. Madame Olenska, leaning back against the boat-rail, drank in the coolness between parted lips. She had wound a long veil about her hat, but it left her face uncovered, and Archer was struck by the tranquil gaiety of her expression. One that he had seen only earlier as she lay in his arms. She seemed to take their adventure as a matter of course, and to be neither in fear of unexpected encounters, nor (what was worse) unduly elated by their possibility.