igh tide lapping just a
little way below. It was into this place of safety that Josephine had
crept when she had disappeared from his view before he could mount the
cliff to see whither she went. She had often stood where he now stood,
half afraid, half audacious, in that curious dress of hers, before she
summoned up courage to slip into the sea for daylight or moonlight
wanderings.

He turned round to hear the gaunt woman beside him again talking
excitedly. Upon a bit of rusty iron that still held its place on the
wall hung what he had taken to be a heap of sacking. She took this down
now and displayed it with a cunning look.

"I made it myself," she said, "it holds one up wonderful in the water;
but now I've been a-dying so long the buoys have burst."

Caius pityingly took the garment from her. Her mad grief, and another
woman's madcap pleasure, made it a sacred thing. His extreme curiosity
found satisfaction in discovering that the coarse foundation was
covered with a curious broidery of such small floats as might, with
untiring industry, be collected in a farmhouse: corks and small pieces
of wood with holes bored through them were fastened at regular
intervals, not without some attempt at pattern, and between them the
bladders of smaller animals, prepared as fishermen prepare them for
their nets. Larger specimens of the same kind were concealed inside the
neck of the huge sack, but on the outside everything was comparatively
small, and it seemed as if the hands that had worked it so elaborately
had been directed by a brain in which familiarity with patchwork, and
other homely forms of the sewing-woman's art, had been confused with an
adequate idea of the rough use for which the garment was needed. Some
knowledge of the skill with which fishermen prepare their floats had
also evidently been hers, for the whole outside of the garment was
smeared or painted with a brownish substance that had preserved it to a
wonderful extent from the ravages of moisture and salt. It was torn now,
or, rather, it seemed that it had been cut from top to bottom; but,
besides this one great rent, it was in a rotten condition, ready to fall
to pieces, and, as the dying woman had said, many of the air-blown
floats had burst.

Caius was wondering whether the occasion on which this curious
bathing-dress had been torn was that in which he, by pursuing Josephine,
had forced her to cease pushing herself about in shallow water and take
to mor