The air was exceedingly warm. The harvest moon in the zenith was
flooding the world with unclouded light. The tide was ebbing, and
therefore there was in the channel that swift, dangerous current
sweeping out to sea of which he had once experienced the strength.
Caius, who associated his sea-visitant only with the sunlight and an
incoming tide, did not expect to see her now; frequent disappointment
had bred the absence of hope. He stood on the shore, looking at the
current in which he had so nearly perished as a boy. It was glittering
with white moon-rays. He thought of himself, of the check and twisting
which his motives and ideas had lately received, and as he thought how
slight a thing had done it, how mysterious and impossible a thing it
was, his mind became stunned, and he faced the breeze, and simply lived
in the sweetness of the hour, like an animal, conscious, not of itself,
but only of what is external, without past or future.
And now he heard a little crooning song from the waters--no words, no
tune that could be called a tune. It reminded him more of a baby's
toneless cooing of joy, and yet it had a rhythm to it, too, and both joy
and pathos in its cadence. Across the bright path of the moon's
reflection he saw her come. Her head and neck were crowned and garlanded
with shining weed, as if for a festival, and she stretched out her white
arms to him and beckoned to him and laughed.
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