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Page 239
abruptly caught her breath in the middle of a sentence. Nearly the whole back wall had been removed and replaced with glass; a foreign colony addition, Linda suspected, but well worth the change in the original architecture. Spread out in a wide panorama was a curving baydusty green slopes, grey-black cliffs, a startling narrow band of white beach, and the sea, so blue a blue that it made the eyes ache. To the right was a formal garden, neatly broken by clean gravel paths. To the left was the most exquisite gazeboa tiny replica of a Greek temple, its screened openings dark against the white columns.
Part of the glass wall was a sliding door, and they stepped out onto a wide verandah that surrounded three sides of the house. "Where to now?" Donald asked. "The gazebo or the sea?"
"The sea, I suppose, because" Linda was about to say she wanted to take a look and see whether she should run back for her swimsuit, but she never got a chance to finish. Just as they stepped off the verandah, Mrs. Bates called out.
"Linda, will you come here, my dear?" And then, as Linda turned back toward the house, "No, I'm in the gazebo."
Once inside, Linda's breath was snatched away again. She had realized that the house sat up on a cliff. The views from the dining room and the verandah showed that the sea was below them, but she had expected the slope to be gentler and, certainly, she had not expected the gazebo to be perched

 
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