The house was three-storied, white clapboard in front with gingerbread embellishments under the eaves and along the roofline; weathered wood shingling was on the sides and rear, in the thrifty way of Cape Codders. Two chimneys broke the gabled roofline. Two additions were on each side of the main structure, and there was a complete wing in the rear, where a large deck opened out onto a red-grass meadow stretching toward Nauset Bay. In front, roses clambered over a split-rail fence and a huge oak spread its branches toward the house. Near it was the bleached ghostly trunk of a second great tree, which had been felled. A huge thicket of wild roses, purple sweet-peas, and brambles swarmed wildly just below the neat apron of lawn.

The house had been built at the foot of a gentle hill in a meadow once used as pasture in the days when the Jowers family were farmers. Near the barn was a vegetable garden and a boat under canvas. The hill, which Tina and Jason walked up as soon as they arrived, looked to the ocean.

The sky was bright blue and the sun warm, but there was in the September air the unmistakable note of summer’s end; the sound of the ocean waves reverberated differently now, indicating that the good season had gone, something else lay ahead. Tina heard the admonition of the waves, felt the change in the air, sensed the beginning of the wane.

“In a way our hardest times are just starting,” she said as she looked at the beautiful sight of vivid green marshland against the bright blue water and the more distant creamy tones of the sand dunes and bars. “This is such a perfect place and time—but for us it’s going to be anything but perfect from now on. In December I’ll be setting up job interviews. I’ll hope for an opening in the Boston area, or in the East anyway, but we may have to adjust to being apart until we get our careers together in the same place.”

“We’ve been separated before,” Jason remarked calmly, chewing on a long strand of grass and looking out to the water.

“It seems peculiar to tell everyone of our plans—to say that we’re going to get married at Thanksgiving and then a month later I’ll be going to the MLA convention in Chicago for job interviews that might be taking me God knows where.”

“Tina,” Jason said, taking her hands and looking at her ironically, “when have you ever cared how strange your plans seem to others?”

“You’re right, Jason. Just as long as you and I know how things are and what we have to look forward to and what we have to live through before it works out.”