A Green Desire [antikvár]

He walked through the cool October night, his shoes sinking in the sand at the water's edge; he looked oirt of place in the gray business suit and white shirt, the carefully knotted tie. His pace was purposeful, but it was the purposefulness of long habit—anyone watching would have said he had lost his way, or was searching for something. Lights from the marina across the channel floated on the tide like low, pale moons, casting a score of moonglades that shimmered with the passage of some small vessel, and then grew still. Far out in the harbor a bell buoy capped with an emerald light uttered a mournful clang-dang, the memory of the two strokes quivering on the night air long after the sound had ceased. —Always that edge of danger about her. That hunger for forbidden shores . . . He stopped, listening for the bell. His eyes had become accustomed to the dark now, and at the top of the bluff he could make out the silhouette of one house, grander than the other sunmier places, the railed widow's walk crowning its gabled roof. That house was dark. —"Don't you tempt me, now!" Unable to resist it, daring it. Don't you tempt me— The bell buoy struck again: one plangent note. Here is where it all began. The sun-drenched possibilities, the world hanging there like ripe golden fruit for whoever could leap high enough to take it. And the temptation. That began here, too. So long ago . . .