h you, but he wouldn't."

She had been slowly riding through a deep, soft sand-drift that was
heaped at the mouth of the hollow, and when they had got through the
opening, Caius saw the ribs of one side of an enormous wreck protruding
from the sand, about six feet in height. A small hardy weed had grown
upon their heads in tufts; withered and sear with the winter, it still
hung there. The ribs bent over a little, as the men he had seen had
bent.

"The cloud-shadows and the moonlight were very confusing," remarked
Josephine; "and then O'Shea made the two sailors stand in the same way,
and they were real. I never knew a man like O'Shea for thinking of
things that are half serious and half funny. I never knew him yet fail
to find a way to do the thing he wanted to do; and it's always a way
that makes me laugh."

If Josephine would not come away with him, would O'Shea find a way of
killing Le Maitre? and would it be a way to make her laugh? With the
awful weight of the tidings he brought upon his heart, all that he said
or did before he told them seemed artificial.

"I thought"--half mechanically--"that I saw them all hold up their
hands."

"Did you?" she asked. "The first two did; O'Shea told them to hold up
their hands."

"There is something you said a minute ago that I want to answer," he
said.

She thought he had left the subject of his illusion because it mortified
him.

"You said"--he began now to feel emotion as he spoke--"that you thought
I should not respect you. I want to tell you that I respected you as I
respect my mother, even when you were only a mermaid. I saw you when I
fell that night as we walked on this beach. If you had worn a boy's
coat, or a fishskin, always, I had sense enough to see that it was a
saint at play. Have you read all the odd stories about the saints and
the Virgin--how they appear and vanish, and wear odd clothes, and play
beneficent tricks with people? It was like that to me. I don't know how
to say it, but I think when good people play, they have to be very, very
good, or they don't really enjoy it. I don't know how to explain it, but
the moderate sort of goodness spoils everything."

Caius, when he had said this, felt that it was something he had never
thought before; and, whatever it might mean, he felt instinctively that
it meant a great deal more than he knew. He felt a little shabby at
having expressed it from her religious point of view, in which he had no
part; but h