him. For a moment she was still, resting thus close, and he could see
distinctly that around her white shoulders there was a coil of what
seemed like glistening rounded scales. He could not decide whether the
brightness in her eye was that of laughing ease or of startled
excitement. Then she turned and darted away from him, and having put
about forty feet between them, she turned and looked back with easy
defiance.

His eyes, fascinated by what was to him an awful thing, were trying to
penetrate the sparkling water and see the outlines of the form whose
clumsy skin seemed to hang in horrid folds, stretching its monstrous
bulk under the waves. His vision was broken by the sparkling splash
which the maiden deliberately made with her hands, as if divining his
curiosity and defying it. He felt the more sure that his senses did not
play him false because the arrangement of the human and fishy substance
of the apparition did not tally with any preconceived ideas he had of
mermaids.

Caius felt no loathing of the horrid form that seemed to be part of her.
He knew, as he had never known before, how much of coarseness there was
in himself. His hands and feet, as he looked down at them, seemed
clumsy, his ideas clumsy and gross to correspond. He knew enough to know
that he might, by the practice of exercises, have made his muscles and
brain the expression of his will, instead of the inert mass of flesh
that they now seemed to him to be. He might--yes, he might, if he had
his years to live over again, have made himself noble and strong; as it
was, he was mutely conscious of being a thing to be justly derided by
the laughing eyes that looked up at him from the water, a man to be
justly shunned and avoided by the being of the white arms and dimpled
face.

And he sat upon the rock looking, looking. It seemed useless to rise or
speak or smile; he remembered the mirth that his former efforts had
caused, and he was dumb and still.

Perhaps the sea-child found this treatment more uninteresting than that
attention he had lavished on her on the former occasion; perhaps she had
not so long to tarry. As he still watched her she turned again, and made
her way swift and straight toward the rocky point. Caius ran, following,
upon the shore, but after a minute he perceived that she could disappear
round the point before, either by swimming or wading, he could get near
her. He could not make his way around the point by the shore; his best
me