"Don't go," called Caius, much urgency in his words.
But the 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.
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