slow receding motion continued, and no answer came but another
gentle wave of the hand.

The hand of Caius stole involuntarily to his lips, and he wafted a kiss
across the water. Then suddenly it seemed to him that the cliff had
eyes, and that it might be told of him at home and abroad that he was
making love to a phantom, and had lost his wits.

The sea-child only tossed her head a little higher out of the water, and
again he saw, or fancied he saw, mirth dancing in her eyes.

She beckoned to him and turned, moving away; then looked back and
beckoned, and darted forward again; and, doing this again and again, she
made straight for the open sea.

Caius cursed himself that he had not the courage to jump in and swim
after her at any cost. But then he could not swim so fast--certainly not
in his clothes. "There was something so wonderfully human about her
face," he mused to himself. His mind suggested, as was its wont, too
many reasonable objections to the prompt, headlong course which alone
would have availed anything.

While he stood in breathless uncertainty, the beckoning hand became lost
in the blur of sparkling ripples; the head, lower now, looked in the
water at a distance as like the muzzle of a seal or dog as like a human
head. By chance, as it seemed, a point of the island came between him
and the receding creature, and Caius found himself alone.

CHAPTER VIII.

BELIEF IN THE IMPOSSIBLE.

Caius clambered up the cliff and over the fence to the highroad. A man
with a cartload of corn was coming past. Caius looked at him and his
horse, and at the familiar stretch of road. It was a relief so to look.
On a small green hillock by the roadside thistles grew thickly; they
were in flower and seed at once, and in the sunshine the white down,
purple flowers, and silver-green leaves glistened--a little picture,
perfect in itself, of graceful lines and exquisite colour, having for
its background the hedge of stunted fir that bordered the other side of
the road. Caius feasted his eyes for a minute and then turned homeward,
walking for awhile beside the cart and talking to the carter, just to be
sure that there was nothing wild or strange about himself to attract the
man's attention. The cart raised no dust in the red clay of the road;
the monotonous creak of its wheels and the dull conversation of its
owner were delightful to Caius because they were so real and
commonplace.

Caius felt very guilty. He could