It was about six feet long. The woman,
seeing his attention directed to it, took it eagerly and showed how it
might be used, drawing him with her to the aperture over the shore and
pointing out eagerly the landmarks by which she knew how far the shallow
water extended at certain times of the tide. Her topographical knowledge
of all the sea's bed within about a mile of the high-water mark was
extraordinarily minute, and Caius listened to the information she poured
upon him, only now beginning to realize that she expected him to wear
the dress, and take the iron pole, and slip from the old cellar into the
tide when it rose high enough, and from thence bring back the girl with
the soft curls and the golden ring. It was one of those moments in which
laughter and tears meet, but there was a glamour of such strange fantasy
over the scene that Caius felt, not so much its humour or its pathos, as
its fairy-like unreality, and that which gave him the sense of unreality
was that to his companion it was intensely real.
"You said you would go." Some perception of his hesitation must have
come to her; her words were strong with insistence and wistful with
reproach. "You said you would go and fetch her in to me before I die."
Then Caius put back the dress she held on the rusty peg where it had
hung for so long.
"I am a man," he said. "I can swim without life-preservers.
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