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them everywhere. They’re always with you, like—’ She cut the sentence off and there was darkness in her eyes.
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘Death,’ the girl said, staring across at him.
    The shadows of the birds slid across the rocks. ‘I know a place where there are only the cliffs and the sea,’ Red said. ‘White sand. White and clean. The rocks shut out everything but the sky and the sea. There’s nothing to make you think of death.’
    Mumsie rose. ‘Show it to me,’ she said softly.
    * * *
    Not far away the waves gnawed hungrily at the rocks. They lay in shadow on the warm sand and high above them hung one lost and lonely cloud. Mumsie sat up and watched the water running up the beach, stopping to push the smooth, white pebbles around a bit with cool white fingers, then drawing away. Presently she turned and stared down at Red. His head was pillowed in his hands.
    ‘When do we go back. Red?’ she asked suddenly.
    Red’s glance rested on her face. He took one of her hands. ‘There’s no hurry. He didn’t die.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘He wants you back.’
    ‘So you’ll take me?’
    ‘I’ve been thinking about things.’
    With her free hand she made patterns in the sand. Red pulled himself up beside her, slid one arm around her shoulders.
    ‘I could tell him you hopped a boat,’ Red said.’I could tell him you had lost yourself in Panama or Chile. Anywhere. That I’m not bloodhound enough to pick up your trail.’
    ‘Would he believe you?’
    ‘I’ll chance it.’
    ‘Then what?’
    ‘You and I,’ Red said softly.
    ‘He’d find us. You don’t know him like I do. Red.’
    Red grinned. ’I don’t want to. What about it?’
    ‘I can’t go back.’
    ‘No. And maybe he doesn’t want you back after all. Maybe he wants his fifty-six thousand bucks.’
    She threw him a puzzled glance.’Fifty-six thousand? Is that what he said?’ Red nodded. ‘So that’s why you’ll take a chance on me?’
    ‘We’ll give it back to him. I’ll say I found you and talked you out of the dough but couldn’t persuade you to come back.’
    ‘I didn’t take that much money,’ Mumsie said. ‘Not anywhere near that much. He lied to you. I took enough to get me here. There’s very little left.’
    ‘All the better, then.’ His arm tightened about her. ‘You can’t accuse me of being greedy’
    ‘No. Only of being foolish.’ She shrugged his arm away, stood up and moved down the sand. The waves swept up the beach and drove her back. Without turning she spoke. ‘All you know about me is I lived with a gambler and when he got tired of me I shot him and ran away.’
    Red rose to stand beside her. ‘That’s not all.’
    ‘What else?’
    ‘A moment.’
    ‘Is that enough?’
    ‘Yes.’ He pulled her closer, tilted her face with one forefinger and kissed her. The waves reached out for them, drew back, reached out again. Far above, the tidy wind swept the lonely cloud away behind the hills.
       
    You got over things like life and death. The thought was somehow frightening when you knew that one of these days Ann might get over you. But you couldn’t deny it, couldn’t say, ‘Hell, it won’t happen to us.’
    Mumsie had come along the hall and had opened the door a while ago. There was a time when he would have been almost breathless waiting for her to come to him, waiting for her lips, her breasts and her body.
    Yes, he had rid himself of desire but he had taken a beating doing it. Love for her was long since dead or, rather, love for the woman he had imagined was dead.
    At first he hadn’t loved her. Those weeks in Acapulco—the nights hot and still until a morning wind came along, the days bright with Mexican voices that were like cricket songs—he had wanted her as he had wanted no other woman in his life. But he saw the imperfections—a smallness, a stinginess, a tendency to give grudgingly or not at all of everything but her body.
    It was on the boat wallowing amiably north that he had stopped seeing