From far away another bob-white began to answer the first bird.

Now she was looking at him. “Why tell me?”

Because I am a fool, he thought wonderingly. “I don’t know. I never told anyone before.”

She reached out and touched his face again. “I’m glad.” In a moment she said, “May I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Making love with that woman . . . you know, a casual affair. Was it any different from the same thing with someone you love?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never loved any of them.”

“That’s like . . . animals.”

“We are animals. There’s nothing wrong with being animals.”

“But we should be more.”

“It’s not always possible.”

The fog was breaking. Shining through it he became conscious of an enormous sun-reflector, more ocean than he had ever looked at. The beach was broad, white, marked only by jetsam and driftwood on the upper reaches and on the lower strands shining and hard and pounded so smooth by the breakers that it glittered in the sun.

“I wanted you to see it,” she said. “I used to sit here and tell myself that if you piled all the ugly hurts down there they would be washed out with the tide.”

He was thinking of that when to his horror she sounded a whoop and disappeared from view over the edge of the precipice, which fell to a dizzying conclusion far below at what was at least a hundred-degree angle. Her buttocks left a straight furrow in the soft red sand. In a moment she was laughing up at him from the bottom. It left only one thing he could do. He sat down on the edge and closed his eyes and then he slid. Him the Almighty Power hurled headlong flaming from the eternal sky with hideous ruin and combustion down to bottomless perdition. John Milton. There was sand in his shoes and no doubt his landslide had not been large enough: His rump was raw. The girl was howling with laughter. When he opened his eyes he realized that when she was happy she was extremely pretty; no, more than that, she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

They combed the beach, finding a number of smelly sponges but no treasure; watched a dogfish undulate its way through a clear little cove; picked up eight unbroken sand-dollars; gouged red clay out of the cliff and fashioned a pot which cracked as it dried in the cold breeze.