In a flashback to August, Gabriel Wolfe’s parents leave for a week in the Highlands, giving Beth and Gabriel the run of the house. Beth is awed by the Wolfe home’s grandeur, from its polished rooms and flower arrangements to the family photographs, especially one of young Gabriel with a Labrador. The house’s elegance also sharpens the contrast between Gabriel’s privileged world and Beth’s own home life.

With only the cleaning woman appearing briefly each day, Beth and Gabriel use the empty house as a private world of their own. They swim, play tennis, sunbathe naked, and make love throughout the house and grounds. Before Beth leaves home for these visits, Beth’s mother quietly gives Beth a diaphragm, showing that she understands the seriousness of the relationship and supports Beth’s sexual independence.

As the days pass, the week takes on a dreamlike, suspended quality. Beth and Gabriel bathe together, improvise odd meals from whatever remains in the larder, and read the same book in step, feeling increasingly fused into a single shared life. In the evenings they drink wine from his father’s cellar, play records, dance, laugh, and enjoy a freedom that makes ordinary time and ordinary rules seem far away.

That intimacy leads them into deeper conversation than before. Beth confesses that someone had loved her before Gabriel and that she fears she broke his heart; the implied person is Frank Johnson, who is rumored to have left school to work full-time on the farm. Gabriel reassures Beth that she is not cruel and tells her he cannot imagine life without her.

Gabriel then shares a more painful secret. He reveals that, years earlier, his mother had fallen in love with another man and wanted to leave Gabriel’s father, but young Gabriel told her that if she left, she would never see him again. Gabriel believes that her decision to stay because of him damaged her, leading to drinking, bitterness, and cruelty, and Beth tries to convince him that he was not responsible for his mother’s unhappiness. On their final night, the lovers ask each other to promise they will never leave, and though the exchange is youthful and half-playful, Beth feels as if their future has been sealed.