She turned from the ocean view and looked down toward the house. “I love this place,” she said. “No matter where we are, this will always feel like the home we’ll come back to.”

It was his grandparents’ home, but also the place all the Jowers sons and daughters and grandchildren came back to. Jason’s family was like her family in Gloversville; they were not artists or poets but good, solid people who could be counted on. “You cannot ask from people more than they are able or want to give,” her father always said.

Preserved in an old drawing that hung in the dining room was a view of what the original cottage had looked like when Timothy Jowers set it up in the 1670s. Low, hugging the ground against the wind and storm of winter, it had provided shelter for the early Jowers families. Some beams and wide plank flooring from the original one room were now encapsulated within the large surrounding structure that had grown up gradually in different periods. Somehow the resulting house achieved substance and dignity without ever losing its original simplicity and honesty of line.

Like the house, the Jowers family had changed: They had started by tilling the soil, and then, when the soil wore thin, had gone to sea as captains for the import trade and the whaling industry. Those, too, had died and the Jowers men were now into the professions—some in Boston, some in New Bedford, a few in other parts of the country and world.

“You know what I like, Jason,” Tina mused, “I like this sense of the elemental and natural; yet it’s all humanized. I mean, out here there’s the land, the barn, the ocean, and inside the house there are the old charts and books and furniture—all the civilizing things. That’s what I like: balance.”

Jason led Tina to the library, a room that had once been the whole of the original dwelling and still showed the old post and beam construction done by the immigrant Timothy Jowers. The room was now the study of Jason’s bachelor uncle, Professor Robert Jowers, who lived with his parents when he wasn’t at Harvard.

“I remember this wonderful room,” Tina said as she looked over the snug, wood-paneled room that was filled with shelves of books, a table full of sailing charts, albums of cabotage charts and harbor soundings, globes, and sailing mementos. Over the fireplace was the handsome carving from the sternboard of the whaling ship Leonidas, which depicted that ancient bearded Spartan in helmet and toga looking out stoically from amidst encircling wreaths and furled banners.

Tina gazed bemused at the bust of the general who, from the battlefields of Thermopylae, had been evoked as a namesake for the Jowers’ ships. Jason seemed to be reading her thoughts.