Colts and other animals cannot laugh at us,
else we might not be so peaceful in our assumption that they never
criticise. Caius before this had always supposed himself happy in his
little efforts to please children and animals; now he knew himself to be
a blundering idiot, and so far from feeling vexed with the laughing face
in the water, he wondered that any other creature had ever permitted his
clumsy caresses.
Having failed once, he now knew not what to do, but stood uncertain,
devouring the beauty of the sprite in the water as greedily as he might
with eyes that were not audacious, for in truth he had begun to feel
very shy.
"What is your name?" he asked, throwing his voice across the water.
The pretty creature raised a hand and pointed at some object behind him.
Caius, turning, knew it to be the epitaph. Yes, that was what his own
intelligence had told him was the only explanation.
Explanation? His reason revolted at the word. There was no explanation
of an impossibility. Yet that the mermaid was the lost child he had now
little doubt, except that he wholly doubted the evidence of his senses,
and that there was a mermaid.
He nodded to her that he understood her meaning about the name, and she
gave him a little wave of her hand as if to say good-bye, and began to
recede slowly, gliding backward, only her head seen above the disturbed
water.
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