“No.”

“You’re hoping.”

“He’s a good man, deep down.”

Olive laughed. “He isn’t.”

“You don’t know him.”

“Oh, poor girl,” she said. “Poor Leenie. I probably do.”

He was a good man, though. Wasn’t he? After all, he’d rescued her from loneliness in that house on Blenheim Road. She hadn’t known, when she accepted the position, how isolated she would feel. Evangeline was usually with the children until close to their suppertime; by the time she was free, the servants had finished their own meal and were busy serving the family dinner. Mrs. Grimsby, the cook, saved a plate for her, which she ate by herself. By seven o’clock she was holed up in her small bedroom for the night.

Many evenings, down the hall from her room, she could hear the servants playing blackjack or hearts around the long table in the kitchen, their voices rising in a showy camaraderie that only made her loneliness more acute. On the few occasions when she ventured out, she’d stand awkwardly in the corner while they cheerfully avoided her. They considered her an odd duck, both an object of gossip for her eccentric habits (such as reading while eating), and a mystery they had little interest in solving. She spoke a vernacular that no doubt reminded them of their employers, and they were clearly relieved when she went back to her room and shut the door.

Into this void came Cecil, three years older and infinitely more worldly. The brush of his fingertips against hers, a private wink over the heads of the children, the flat of his hand on the small of her back when no one was looking: in these small ways he telegraphed his intentions.

Over the weeks and months of their acquaintance, his ardor became more persuasive, his entreaties more endearing. “Dear Evangeline!” he whispered. “Even your name is picturesque.” He’d studied Chaucer at Cambridge for the sole purpose, he told her, of memorizing lines to whisper in her ear:

She was fair as is the rose in May.

And:

What is better than wisdom? Woman. And what is better than a good woman? Nothing.

Everything about him awed her. This man had sat in cafés in Paris at midnight, traversed Venetian canals by gondola, swum in the ice-blue waters of the Mediterranean. And then there was the matter of that brown tendril of hair that feathered against his neck, those rangy shoulders under a crisp linen shirt, the aquiline nose and lush red lips . . .

“You captivate me,” he said, tugging at the strings of her bodice.

“You are the only woman for me,” he breathed into her hair.

“But what about—what about . . .”

“I adore you. I want to spend every hour of every day with you.”

“It is . . . immoral.”

“It is moral to us. Why should we concern ourselves with the chiding of provincial bores?”

In the same way that it’s nearly impossible to imagine the brutal cold of winter on a hot summer day, Evangeline basked in the heat of Cecil’s affection with little thought of its ending. He promised just enough to persuade her that he shared the emotions she felt so deeply.