Before Richard Hand said good-bye to Mary Vanton that September he told her frankly of his love for her.

“I am not doing a dishonourable thing,” he insisted. “If I tell you this, now, it is my right to speak and your right to hear.”

[254]Mary Vanton sat looking directly at him, the brilliance gone from her blue eyes, the depths in them showing, the depths in her showing, too, in the way she listened, and the words she uttered. Her wonderful hair, darkly red, lay framed against the white linen of a chair covering, a chair with a tall back that seemed to shield and protect her and bring out in relief the milky whiteness of her fine skin, unchanged by the sun and salt air, like a pure and unspotted marble.

“No,” she said, slowly, “it is not dishonourable. For it is not myself, Mary Vanton, that you love, but the girl Mermaid. I am not she. I am much altered.”

“You are Mermaid,” he said, simply, and in his voice there was reverence.

She shook her head at this and seemed to fall to pondering the questions his confession raised.

“Your husband,” he went on, “has deliberately turned his back. It is necessary that you should have some material assistance. It will be necessary—from time to time. I don’t mean money, but I do mean counsel, advice, someone to talk things over with, help with the children, particularly with the boys. Young John, for example. He’s fourteen and you are sending him away to school. You’re letting me take him and you don’t know what it means to me!” Like most people, Dick Hand was not ashamed to show feeling, though he hesitated, embarrassed, before a revelation of the depth of it. And this went deep. He lifted his[255] head abruptly and his glance pierced the blue surface of the woman’s eyes and sank silently to unfathomable soundings.

In those strange regions they met. It was like the embodiment of a fancy as old as Kingsley’s “Water-Babies.” But it was not a meeting of sprites, not a meeting in play. She was Mermaid; he was Merman. She was the incarnation of youth for him; he was the incarnation of dreams for her. Each saw in the other something lost or denied.

“You are what I would most wish to be, were I not Mary Vanton,” she was saying, evenly, and he found it hard to believe that she was uttering the words, so magically did th............