intention of swimming the narrow sea in answer to the beckoning hand.
Yet his whole mind was thrown into confusion with the strangeness of it.
He thought he heard a woman's laughter come across to him with the
lapping waves, and his face flushed with the indignity this offered.

The mermaid left her distance, and by a series of short darts came
nearer still, till she stopped again about the width of a broad highroad
from the discomforted man. He knew now that it must be truly a mermaid,
for no creature but a fish could thus glide along the surface of the
water, and certainly the sleek, damp little head that lay so comfortably
on the ripple was the head of a laughing child or playful girl. A crown
of green seaweed was on the dripping curls; the arms playing idly upon
the surface were round, dimpled, and exquisitely white. The dark
brownish body he could hardly now see; it was foreshortened to his
sight, down slanting deep under the disturbed surface. If it had not
been for the indisputable evidence of his senses that this lovely sea
thing swam, not with arms or feet, but with some snake-like motion, he
might still have tried to persuade himself that some playful girl,
strange to the ways of the neighbourhood, was disporting herself at her
bath.

It was of no avail that his reason told him that he did not, could not,
believe that such a creature as a mermaid could exist. The big dark eyes
of the girlish face opened wide and looked at him, the dimpled mouth
smiled, and the little white hand came out from the water and beckoned
to him again.

He was suffering from no delirium; he had not lost his wits. He stamped
his foot to make sure that the rock was beneath him; he turned about on
it to rest his eyes from the water sparkles, and to recall all sober,
serious thought by gazing at the stable shore. His eye stayed on the
epitaph of the lost child. He remembered soberly all that he knew about
this dead child, and then a sudden flash of perception seemed to come to
him. This sweet water-nymph, on whom for the moment he had turned his
back, must be the baby's soul grown to a woman in the water. He turned
again, eager not to lose a moment of the maiden's presence, half fearful
that she had vanished, but she was there yet, lying still as before.

Of course, it was impossible that she should be the sea-wraith of the
lost child; but, then, it was wholly impossible that she should be, and
there she was, smiling at him, and Caius