Afterward they went out onto the porch in the evening air—constrained, all of them—to say their farewells. Sarah and Bill Howard came out and went down the steps as if they knew no one on the veranda, and disappeared, arm in arm, in the direction of Tom Nevershead. Billie and Cliff Hauman were to go to bed early, they explained. A taxi was to call at six in the morning in order to get them to Nantucket in time for the seven-o’clock boat to Woods Hole. They would arrive in New York late that afternoon; and on Monday morning—the examination that would decide everything. Cliff’s eyes shone as he said this, but he was not himself; he was not thinking of them or of anyone else. The farewells meant nothing; he would much sooner have left at once without a word.

Now that it was the end, John Grandin stood about awkwardly on the veranda, facing the Haumans somewhat formally. Cliff was not so much self-­conscious as preoccupied; he was very quiet, and said little during the few moments they had left. Billie, remembering her manners, smiled dreamily.

“And what are your plans, Mr. Grandin?” she asked politely. “Maybe we’ll be seeing you and your wife in New York sometime,” she added, with listless indifference.

“I have to be in New York for the opening of summer school, a week from now, but Ethel is staying at her mother’s in Maine where the children are. I may be alone a month or so—it does them so much good to be in the country . . .”

With a sudden concern, Billie said: “You mean you and Mrs. Grandin won’t be seeing each other for a whole month?”

He smiled. “When you’ve been married as long as we have—” He gave a small laugh. “I suppose it sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? But it’s one of the facts of marriage.”

Billie wasn’t listening. Absorbed in some troubling thought of her own, she took Cliff’s arm in an abstracted fashion almost as if she were unaware of what she was doing. Instinctively she moved close to him, holding his thick arm with both hands, and gazed fixedly at Grandin. In a small worried voice as if she were thinking aloud, addressing no one in particular, she said: “Oh dear, I couldn’t be away from Cliff that long. . . .”

They went upstairs together. At the top of the first landing they parted, the Haumans to go one way down the long corridor to their room, Grandin the other.