despising the career and the fame of a writer. What did
thinking matter? The great thing was to live, to live with your body,
out-of-doors, close to nature, somewhat as the savages live. When he
waded to shore for the first time, and saw, as the net was hauled in, the
fish he had caught gleaming and leaping in the light, he could have
shouted like a boy.

He seized the net once more, but Gaspare, now clothed, took hold of him
by the arm with a familiarity that had in it nothing disrespectful.

"Signore, basta, basta! Giulio will go in now."

"Si! si!" cried Giulio, beginning to tug at his waistcoat buttons.

"Once more, Gaspare!" said Maurice. "Only once!"

"But if you take cold, signorino, the signora--"

"I sha'n't catch cold. Only once!"

He broke away, laughing, from Gaspare, and was swiftly in the sea. The
Sicilians looked at him with admiration.

"E' veramente piu Siciliano di noi!" exclaimed Nito.

The others murmured their assent. Gaspare glowed with pride in his pupil.

"I shall make the signore one of us," he said, as he deftly let out the
coils of the net.

"But how long is he going to stay?" asked Nito. "Will he not soon be
going back to his own country?"

For a moment Gaspare's countenance fell.

"When the heat comes," he began, doubtfully. Then he cheered up.

"Perhaps he will take me with him to England," he said.

This time Maurice waded with the net into the shadow of the rocks out of
the light of the moon. The night was waning, and a slight chill began to
creep into the air. A little breeze, too, sighed over the sea, ruffling
its surface, died away, then softly came again. As he moved into the
darkness Maurice was conscious that the buoyancy of his spirits received
a slight check. The night seemed suddenly to have changed, to have
become more mysterious. He began to feel its mystery now, to be aware of
the strangeness of being out in the sea alone at such an hour. Upon the
shore he saw the forms of his companions, but they looked remote and
phantom-like. He did not hear their voices. Perhaps the slow approach of
dawn was beginning to affect them, and the little wind that was springing
up chilled their merriment and struck them to silence. Before him the
dense blackness of the rocks rose like a grotesque wall carved in
diabolic shapes, and as he stared at these shapes he had an odd fancy
that they were living things, and that they were watching him at his
labor. He could not get this i