Really the most sensible thing he could have done was to have gone straight home to Boston. But something made him stay on in Europe, traveling about, seeing the sights, wandering from country to country with an air of melancholy brooding. Some instinct made him believe that if he was ever to find that kind of love again, it would be here, amid the wreckage of war, in one of these strange old countries. Gradually, as he traveled and read and thought, the idea began to torment him that he’d inadvertently been entirely dishonorable in his dealings with Agnes—that it was the girl to whom he had a responsibility, not the unknown Edward. That he had abandoned her in the most dishonorable manner just when she needed him most. He would never make a mistake like that again, that was for sure. The next time he fell in love there would be no procrastination, no delay. He would seize his moment and secure his happiness. Newly resolved and in better spirits, he sailed to England, where he was introduced to the Viscount Ticksted and invited to come for dinner one night at his house on the flat grey marshlands of Suffolk.

And there she was.

Looking back, Robert fancied that even on that very first night, watching the twenty-year-old girl smiling pleasantly and eating her roast pheasant with quiet precision, he could discern the real Genevieve beneath the demure exterior. When he visited again and again in what become a three-month courtship, his own feelings rapidly developed. What a contrast to the vulnerable, watery Agnes this girl was. This beautiful girl, with all her fire and passion—the Honourable Genevieve Samuel, as she was then—well, this was the girl for him. For keeps. He’d give her whatever she wanted if only she’d agree to be his.

“I have to be free,” she said on that momentous day in the drawing room, and she gripped his hands so hard he thought she would break them. “I can never be free here.” And then she told him a story. An anxious, incoherent story about a horse she had as a child. “I’d ride for miles and miles and hours and hours,” she said. “I’ve never felt so free in my life.” One day, she said, there was a gunshot. A poacher, perhaps. The horse, frightened, threw Genevieve. She wasn’t hurt badly, but she never saw the horse again.

“You have to take me away from here.” (He was wondering, now, if she had a fever.) “How quickly do you think it can be arranged?” Finally she released his hands, and her eyes looked liquid and dreamy. “When we get married, I’ll wear my cream silk shoes with the rhinestones by Alfred Victoria Argence. Paris isn’t just a city, Robert. You’ll see.”