They met, the two, on the beach, on a long sweep of the ocean shore where snipe were running at the edge of the lacy waves but where there was no other human being within sight or sound of them. They had met, you may say, before—at the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station, for instance, where Mermaid had kissed her father and shaken hands with everybody, including the one or two surviving honorary uncles of her childhood. They had sat them down at the long table over which Cap’n Smiley still presided, encouraging the art of conversation as one of those social amenities that marked the civilized man. They had eaten heartily[222] of simple and appetizing fare, had joked, laughed, told stories. Mermaid had been delighted at the physical transformation in Guy. He was broader shouldered, or certainly seemed so, and was obviously heavier, “filled out,” as her father put it. The colour in his cheeks was a thing to wonder at; so was the calm of his eyes. They were still those wild-animal eyes, but the look in them was that of a creature at peace with the world and, for the rest, unafraid. He was, except for the fact of a somewhat wider education, one of them.

But that had not been a meeting. This was their meeting, here on the smooth and endless stretch of hard-packed sand at the ocean’s edge.

They stood side by side, not looking at each other but at the ocean, at the curling, magnificent breakers which the southeast wind was driving in. The sun shone, the air was magic. Bird cries reached them, a tiny treble to the bass of the water’s roar.

“Out of the ocean you came,” he said. “Will you slip away and return into it again some day, I wonder? Mermaid! The name is poetry and the story is romance. When you go back, you must look for me. I shall be a wreathed Triton, blowing ............