When their lips parted, she stared deeply into his eyes. “I need you,” she said.

“I need you,” he said.

She clung to his neck again, nestling her face into the small of his neck, and beyond the call of the seagulls above and the mellow slap of the waves meeting the shore, all that mattered was the song of the rolling waves that gently rocked them. They continued making love, and then he reached a hand to her breast so that he could squeeze the tip. The mere touch of his hand sent a shudder trilling through her body, and so he continued to massage the nipple, enhancing her excitement. The more excited she grew, the more aroused he became.

She sighed lightly at first, and then began moaning loudly as though her voice were part of the gentle passing breeze.

“Oh, Newland,” she said. She held him tight as her hips began to writhe more insistently. And before long, he knew from the way her vessel squeezed that the moment was upon her. He let her take control of the pace. He knew her body well enough that he could judge the moment when she released, and he orgasmed right along with her. For the next minutes, they lolled in the surf, letting the waves wash over their bodies. Neither was in a hurry to return to shore, as the gratification from the release was overpowering.

“You won’t go back,” he said.

“I won’t go back,” she said.

Before the sun was too low in the sky, they returned to the inn. After a quiet moment in a private room, it was soon time to depart; and turning away she opened the door and led the way into the public dining-room.

The strident school-teachers were gathering up their possessions preparatory to a straggling flight to the wharf; across the beach lay the white steam-boat at the pier; and over the fading sunlit waters Boston loomed in a line of haze.

Chapter 7

Once more on the boat, and in the presence of others, Archer felt a tranquillity of spirit that surprised as much as it sustained him.

The day, according to any current valuation, had not been a rather ridiculous failure; he had not so much as touched Madame Olenska’s hand with his lips without feeling the intense pleasure that he anticipated, nor had he extracted one word from her that gave anything other than the promise of farther opportunities. Nevertheless, for a man sick with unsatisfied love, and parting for an indefinite period from the object of his passion, he felt himself almost humiliatingly calm and comforted. It was the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to others and their honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet tranquillized him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her tears and her falterings showed, but resulting naturally from her unabashed sincerity. It filled him with a tender awe, now the danger was over, and made him thank the fates that no personal vanity, no sense of playing a part before sophisticated witnesses, had tempted him to tempt her into anything that they both did not desire. Even after they had clasped hands for good-bye at the Fall River station, and he had turned away alone, the conviction remained with him of having saved out of their meeting much more than he had sacrificed. They had not quit the lives they had chosen. And they were rewarded for it by the passion they had shared.