IN the morning young Glyn lost his steamer, so he was forced to spend the whole day at Pemaquid; in the afternoon he lost his heart, so he was forced to stay there for his entire vacation.

This is the way it happened.

After luncheon he went out to sit all by himself on the end of the pier, with a book on “Recent Developments in Dairy Machinery”; for Glyn was a young patent lawyer, a very rising one, in the city of New York; and, as he had failed to find one familiar face in this far-away Maine resort, it seemed to him that he could do nothing better with his time of waiting than devote it to his business. So he sat deep in study, lifting an eye occasionally to the granite cliffs, the dark, ancient fir trees, and the bay with its distant rim of purple-shadowed hills; while the old fisherman beside him smoked his pipe placidly, and the noisy crowd of bathers in by the shore splashed one another with screams of mirth. The student sighed occasionally, for, though a lawyer and a good one, he was still young; then he reproved himself for his sighing, for he aimed to be rather superior, and was also, as a matter of fact, rather shy.

Suddenly a shower of scattering drops fell cold upon his neck and glittered upon the page before him. He started and looked up; the sky was blue and cloudless, his ancient neighbor as placid as the day itself. Then it seemed to him that he heard a laugh, the merest tinkle of a laugh, from somewhere below the wharf; and, starting to his feet and looking downward, he beheld a mermaid floating in the water beneath him.

She lay slim and green upon the gentle harbor swell, her white arms outstretched, her eyelids closed, her wet, upturned face framed by the floating wreaths of dark hair that coiled and rippled in the water about her. Suddenly she threw up her hands and sank slowly, vanishing with a cloud of little bubbles. Glyn started back, horror-smitten. He was not much of a swimmer, even in the warm waters of the Sound; and this North Atlantic water chilled his very eyes with its icy-green transparency.

Nevertheless, under the racial impulse of the life-saver, he threw off his coat and swung his arms preparatory to a jump. Suddenly the hoary and languid old sea dog by his side reached out a slow, restraining hand.

“Don’t go wettin’ yourself for nothing young fellah! That girl, she’s a fish. Watch and see her come up again.”

In a cold perspiration of anxiety the young man waited for a fulfillment of these words. The suspense seemed endless, till suddenly, and at an amazing distance, the waters heaved and parted, and the swimmer’s sleek dark head emerged like a seal’s. Back she came to the wharf, swimming with strokes like those of an oarsman—easy, long and sure. At the end of the pier she paused and clung to the foot of the slippery green steps that ran down the side of the piles, and, resting her chin upon her clasped arms, she glanced up at the two men above her like a severe and dripping cherub. The old fisherman returned to his line, but the student, flinging away his book, ran down the oozy staircase to meet her.

“May I—may I be of any assistance to you?” he inquired, with eager politeness.

She continued to look up at him with the same disapproving air. “You didn’t jump in after me, did you?” she observed, suddenly.

“Well, no,” returned Glyn, somewhat dazed at this greeting. “You see, I was told that you could swim.”

She glared up at the unobserving fisherman. “That was Ben—old tattle-tale!” she hissed; then, turning back to the young man, she inquired, with sudden pathos: “And how should you have felt if I had never come up again?”

“Like a murderer,” replied Stephen Glyn, solemnly. The answer seemed to please her, for she relaxed her frown. “Oh, well, you are all right, anyway,” she was good enough to observe, as she loosed her hold upon the step and swam slowly away to the shore.

So when the afternoon steamer left Pemaquid, one hour later, it left without Stephen Glyn.

He told himself that the air of this sea-girt promontory was just the thing for him: good chance to learn to swim; quiet place, capital chance to study and get at the bottom of those dairy implements. As for the girl—she was pretty to look at, to be sure, with her big green eyes and the glancing motions of her long white hands beneath the water. But still what did the prettiness of a passing girl matter to a prosaic fellow like him? “Besides,” as Stephen added, wisely, to himself, “I’m too old for nonsense, and too young for business—so what’s the use?”

And so, being in this indifferent frame of mind, he spent an hour in putting on his newest English flannels and the very latest thing in pale green shirts, and then, upon descending to the dining room, he bribed the waiter to give him a seat at the next table to his casual acquaintance of the pier; merely, as he told himself, out of curiosity to see how she looked with her hair dry.

In spite of all this indifference, there was a distinct sinking at Glyn’s heart when at last she came, passed by him, seated herself at her table without even a glance in his direction. She seemed in high spirits, she ate with a remarkable appetite, and she talked and laughed incessantly with the large, pink-faced lady on her right and the jolly youth in a blue necktie on her left. All Glyn’s honest Harvard blood rose and boiled within him at the sight of that blue necktie—merely, he assured himself, at the thought of recent football scores. As for the girl, what did it matter to him if she let a dozen Yale men tell her jokes and crack her lobster claws for her?

It must be confessed, however, even by the most disapproving and indifferent critic, that she was charming to look upon, with her thick hair—yellow with greenish lights—and her warm, white skin, tanned by the sun to the pale brown of coffee with cream in it. So after dinner, when a half dozen other youths had dispossessed the Yale man of his monopoly, Glyn strolled up to him and inquired whether he had not seen him at New London the month before.

The Yale man replied to these overtures of friendship with the offer of his cigarette case, his name and the secrets of his heart. “I’m Martin, ’05,” he confided. “Ever been in New Haven? Best place on earth! I say, how do you like Pemaquid—how long are you going to stay? There are some ripping girls here. At least, there’s Elfie May, that girl I sat next to at the table. Notice her? A queen, isn’t she? And you just ought to see her swim! But she throws a fellow down so. I guess I’ll go home to-morrow.” The blithe face drew down into sudden sadness—ah, poor little Yale man!

“The girl that sat next to you at dinner,” mused Glyn. “Ah, yes. I think I noticed her—rather good-looking, yes. New York girl?”

“No, Boston. Want me to introduce you?”

“If you will be so kind,” returned Glyn, with elation, and a sudden softening of his heart toward the blue. Martin went over to the far end of the piazza, where Miss May sat trailing her indifferent gaze across her little court of admirers, and laughing lazily at their witticisms and their compliments. As the Yale man spoke to her, Glyn saw her glance flash for a brief instant in his direction, and he started forward to meet his new friend halfway upon his return. But oh, disappointment! “I’m so sorry,” said the pleasant little chap from New Haven, “but she says no! I don’t know why, but she said it, just like that—no!”

“It doesn’t matter in the least,” returned Glyn. “And thank you so much for taking all that trouble.” He spoke gayly, but his hand trembled as he tried to strike a light upon the side of his match case. “Here, let me give you some fire, old chap,” cried his new acquaintance, genially.

That night Glyn did not sleep very well. Not that he cared one scrap for a snub from a disagreeable, spoiled child! But deep down he recognized what it was—the regretful ache, the yearning, baffled tenderness that had newly filled his heart. He writhed in recollection of the repulse he had received, and then forgot the pain in delight as that glance came back to him, those eyes raised to him from the water, eyes so thickly fringed, with dark irids rimmed in clear sea green.

Dawn broke early and brilliant; after that there was no sleep for the restless newcomer, and suddenly it occurred to him that the best plan—the most enjoyable and the most independent—would be to hire a craft and go out for a day’s deep sea fishing, far from the jars and distractions of the hotel. For though, like many sailors, he had but little skill in swimming, he was excellent at managing a boat, and fishing was one of his favorite sports. A descent to the pier, in the long-shadowed quiet of the early morning, proved this plan easy of fulfillment. Old Ben, the fisherman of the day before, was there clearing out his tiny sloop, the Fried Cod. For a mildly exorbitant sum he agreed to let the boat to the New York man for the day, provide tackle, throw in bait, and give all necessary directions to the fishing grounds.

So Glyn had a day of long-shore sport, of long waiting, of rolling in a hot and oily sea, finally of hauling in fat, plobby fish—cod and hake, which lacked blood to make even a decent fighting struggle for their lives. Then in the calm of the sunset the Fried Cod drifted back with the tide into the little harbor on the nose of the rocky promontory. Her skipper worked lazily at the sweeps, keeping a dazzled eye out ahead over the glassy reflection of the golden west which fronted him. Suddenly, as he floated in between the breakwaters, it seemed to him that he saw the head of a swimmer silhouetted blackly against the sunlit water, approaching him from the shore in a wake of fire.

“Sloop ahoy!” called a slow, soft voice. Glyn jumped up, his heart beating, and with a few more vigorous side strokes the swimmer shot to the side of the little craft and blinked two clear wet eyes up at its skipper.

“Please, may I come aboard for a moment?”

Glyn forgot all past injuries as he bent over the side of the boat, beaming upon the face upturned to him from its aureole of ripples.

“Oh, I can climb up all right,” she cried, in answer to his offers of aid, and with a quick, vaulting motion she swung herself up over the gunwale of the little sloop. Seating herself upon the thwart, she threw back her long, wet locks from her face, and shot a glance, half serious and wholly sweet, at the young man before her.

“I’ve been waiting for you all day,” she said, plaintively. “Why didn’t you come in sooner?”

Glyn regarded her in amazement.

“Well, you could hardly expect me to believe that I was wanted,” he retorted, in a slightly aggrieved tone, remembering his wrongs of last night.

She began to laugh softly—a long, noiseless chuckle that moved even Glyn’s watchful dignity to a smile. “Oh, you mean last night.” Glyn noticed that her voice was deep and smooth, with just the faintest suspicion of hoarseness, and deep, mellow tones and overtones that vibrated richly through its inflections. “Last night, you see, is just what I want to explain,” she went on. “You see, that little Martin thing has such a funny way of dropping his jaw when one says no to him, that I just couldn’t resist. And, besides, you see, I didn’t want to have him introducing us—little calf! So, if you don’t mind, I’ll just introduce myself: Elfrida May, that’s my name.”

Glyn looked at her seriously as he set his tiller for a course to the anchorage near the pier. “Thanks very much,” he returned, “but, if you don’t mind, I should rather make believe it was Undine.”

“Undine!” she cried. “Who was Undine?”

“You don’t know about poor little Undine? Very well, then, I’ll tell you her story some time. Now you must let me introduce myself, too.”

“Oh, I know your name, Mr. Glyn,” she cried, artlessly, and, extending her wet hand, she gave him a hearty grip, like a man’s.

Suddenly her eye roved to the floor of the little cockpit, and her face took on suddenly its severe lines of the day before. “Ah, they are dead!” she whispered, in a kind of horrified way; then stooping, she picked up one of the fish—a small cod, curved in a rigid bow from nose to tail. She stroked its slippery back tenderly. “Poor little thing!” she mourned.

Glyn stared at her bewildered. “Don’t you approve of fishing?” he asked.

“No, I don’t!” she replied, with vehemence. “I won’t eat them, even canned! I’d feel like a cannibal! Poor things! To drown in the lovely green water—that wouldn’t be bad. But to be pulled out of the sea, and drown in the air, think how horridly unpleasant! Do you mind if I put them back again, please?” she asked, anxiously.

“Certainly not,” replied Glyn, though, as a matter of fact, he was particularly fond of fresh boiled cod, and also proud of his morning’s catch.

One by one the tender-hearted pirate dropped the motionless things softly into the sea; they sank heavily, and then rose, floating with white bellies upturned. Her eyes, as she regarded them, were surprisingly soft and tender. “Poor things,” she murmured, “they can’t swim any more, but I am sure that they must rest easier so. Thank you, Mr. Glyn, for giving them back to me.”

And so their friendship began, in bewilderment and mutual good will.

Now, much can happen in a month, and as July drew near to a close Stephen no longer tried to disguise from himself the change that had come into his life. The question that unceasingly knocked at his brain was no longer “Do I care for her?” but “Does she, oh, can she possibly, care for me!” The very intensity with which he put this question to himself made him delay, from day to day, the crucial test of putting it to the only person that could decide it for him. So he relieved his feelings by sending every week to Maillard’s for a huge box wrapped in silver paper; and every morning he waited with impatient heart upon the pier for the coming of that slim and dancing figure with the long green silk legs, the cream-white arms and the flying strands of pale yellow hair, that fell to the hem of the short green petticoat.

Her skill in the water was to him a constant wonder, a constant delight. His own attempts at diving and swimming he soon gave up, finding this northern water too cold for him; and so, in spite of Elfrida’s gibes, he sat on the dock and watched her as she took backward somersaults and dead-man dives and went down below in search of sinking clam shells. Her high jump from the piles, holding up her little skirt with a dainty hand, and winking blithely as she descended, was a thing long to be remembered for sheer mirth, for frank, childish joy. Yet it was then that Stephen sighed as he regarded her. After all, was it a woman he loved, with a warm human heart to respond to his own; or a careless mermaid, a cold creature, whose sole joy was thus dancing, plunging, flashing through the foam of the white, curling waves? So far as he could judge, there was no real affection in her heart except this for her friend, the sea. Toward her mother, a heavy, placid woman with literary pretensions, Elfrida was kind in an impersonal, far-off sort of way; to the other girls in the hotel—who respected her for her high dives and hated her for her monopoly of the few men at Pemaquid—she seemed indifferent, with a kind of mocking politeness; while toward her little court of admirers she showed a capricious tyranny, at times almost savage. To these things even the adoring eyes of Stephen Glyn could not be blind; and one day when, owing to a severe headache of her mother’s, she was obliged to forego her swim, and appeared at dinner a muttering thundercloud, it was impossible for even the most ardent of adorers to pass by these signs without a sigh.

True, she had shown a tender heart toward the lifeless cod and hake; and sometimes, as she looked at the sea, in the uproar of a summer squall or in the silvery silence of a fog, Glyn would be startled by the look that suddenly crept into her eyes.

“Ah!” she breathed one evening, as they sat together watching the sunset from the pier. “Ah, it wouldn’t be hard to die, would it, if one could lie at the bottom of the sea?” Glyn grunted uncomfortably in answer, and tried to look as though he agreed with this sentiment.

The next day, when they were out canoeing together, Elfrida surprised him by reverting suddenly to one of the first conversations of their acquaintance. “You said you were going to tell me about Undine,” she said, “but you haven’t—not a word.”

Glyn sighed as he regarded her. She had been unusually tantalizing, not to say aggravating, that afternoon, and his honest heart was sore within him. But what better mood, what better occasion, for relating the story of the unfortunate water nymph, from the time she first appeared in the hut of the old fisherman, a light-hearted, soulless child, to the unhappy hour when, abandoned by the man she loved, she vanished silently into her native element—“a woman gifted with a soul, filled with love and heir to suffering.”

It was but recently that Stephen had read the story, and he told it well, for, though a lawyer, he was in love, and he had a poetical soul. Elfrida listened in silence, her face turned away, her hand trailing in the still water beside her. After the story-teller had finished, there was a pause.

“Well,” said Stephen, disappointed, “didn’t you like it?”

Elfrida glanced up at him—a quick, irresolute glance, quite unlike her usual frank gaze. She seemed about to speak, but to Glyn’s disappointment she turned away her head again, so that her face was hidden from him. With her trailing hand she drew a long, dripping spray of brown seaweed from the water.

“What did Undine gain, after all,” she said, “by leaving the sea?”

“She learned how to love, and she won a soul,” responded Stephen, leaning toward her. “Don’t you think that she was the gainer, after all?”

She suddenly flung away the seaweed. “No, I don’t!” she cried, passionately. “In the sea she had freedom and happiness! But love—what did she find it, after all, but a miserable slavery? And she got her heart broken in the end. No, indeed, you can’t make me pity her—she was just silly, your Undine!”

Nothing more was spoken as they paddled to the shore. Glyn was hurt, disappointed; and Elfrida kept her face still turned away.

The next morning, however, Glyn was more disappointed than ever; for when he came down to breakfast he failed to find the one face that he desired to see. From Mrs. May he learned that Elfrida had gone out for a day’s sail with young Martin and two or three others. So he moped about all day, smoking and trying to read his “Dairy Machinery,” now sadly rusty. And from time to time he was drawn unwillingly into the universal discussion on costumes for the coming dance and masquerade.

Toward evening Elfrida and her companions returned. In spite of her day’s amusement, her face wore its severe expression, and she glanced at him without a smile as she passed him on the piazza.

“You’ve been here all day, I suppose,” she said, with an inflection of resentment in her tone. “Just think, a great big man like you afraid to go into the sea!”

Before Glyn could open his mouth to defend himself she was gone. But after dinner she came to him with a shy, suspicious air, and a touch of mystery that was explained by her first words.

“See here,” she said, softly, “this masquerade. I’ve been thinking it over, and I think if I can manage it, I want to go as Undine, you know.”

Stephen was filled with delight. “And you’ll let me help plan your dress?” he cried.

Elfie nodded, and offered her ideas on the subject to the approval of his authority. The young man listened, offered suggestions here and there, and then, with a sudden backward thought, he remembered a trinket in his possession—a little pearl bracelet, a trifle, but beyond anything appropriate to the costume in hand. Within himself he resolved to send home immediately for it, and to present it to Elfrida on the night of the dance.

In the days that followed it seemed to him that he saw strangely little of her, and the little that he did see was less than satisfactory. Her absence from the piazza, and her refusals to go paddling with him, she excused on the plea of being busy with her new costume. But even on the pier at the bathing hour she seemed to shun him, or noticed him only with jeers and gibes at what she called his laziness.

“Ah, can anybody have a soul that is afraid of the sea?” she cried. “Come, Mr. Martin, let us race over to the monument!” With a splash and a flounce the two set out together, the green bathing dress and the triumphant blue; while Glyn sat alone on the wharf with a leaden heart and rage at his soul.

This state of affairs had very little altered when at last the day of the dance arrived. A hundred times in the interim had Stephen resolved to give up the whole affair and go home; but then he decided to wait and see this new Undine in the flesh. To his anxiety, the bracelet had not yet arrived; nor did it come until the last post on the evening of the dance, after everybody had gone upstairs to dress. In joyful relief, Stephen slipped the little box in the pocket of his improvised admiral’s costume, and ran downstairs to the hall to wait for the coming of his Undine.

Elfrida did not appear till late, when the room was filled with whirling harlequins and Pompadours and Swiss peasant maidens. The admiral stood by the door, waiting for her, his little box in his hand and his heart in his mouth. Finally, as though she had been on the watch to avoid him, he saw her enter the hall by one of the long windows opening from the veranda without. In spite of his vexation, he could not but smile with sheer pleasure at the sight of her, as her eyes and her white teeth flashed a smile upon the room. In her pale, sea-green draperies, dragging heavily at the hem with a fragile border of urchin shells, her creamy neck and shoulders bare, her flowing yellow hair bound and wreathed with strands of dark, wet seaweed—oh, she was pretty, indeed! Stephen sprang forward.

“Good-evening, Undine! Here—I have something for you, will you let me give it to you? A little ornament to complete your costume.”

“You may give it to me later,” she replied, with an indifference that chilled and baffled him; and he watched her miserably as she swung off into the two-step with a tall, sunburned youth from Boston—a conceited-looking pup, Glyn told himself, in a vain attempt at consolation.

The evening was half over before he managed to get near her again. “Our dance, Mr. Glyn,” she cried, taking his arm and smiling up at him. Her eyebrows, which, in spite of her fair hair, were black and thickly ridged, were arched high in the mocking expression that he hated to see upon her face. She was in wild spirits, gay with the evening’s success, fluttered with a reckless and inconsequent laughter that set the fibers of her lover’s heart quivering painfully.

“Let’s go down on the breakwater,” she said, “instead of dancing. It’s so hot here.” Bewildered and obedient, Stephen followed her, and a few moments later they were sitting side by side at the end of the moonlit pier.

“Doesn’t the water look nice?” cried Elfie, bending over it lovingly. “For two cents, I’d jump into it this very moment.”

“Please don’t!” expostulated Stephen, in alarm. She turned her bright eyes toward him.

“What did you say you had for me?” she said.

Half shamefacedly, Stephen drew from his pocket the little box that he had received a few hours before. “Just a trifle,” he said, “that I picked up in Swabia a few years ago. See!” He opened the cover and took out a slender string of fresh-water pearls set in silver, some milk-white, some shimmering prismatically in the moonlight.

“Oh, how lovely!” cried Elfie, with artless delight. “And they’re for me?”

“If you’ll take them,” replied Stephen, hurriedly. “You see, they are perfectly valueless little things—but the reason I wanted you to wear them was because, you see, they really belong to you. These pearls are found in one of the headwaters of the Danube, in Undine’s own country. The peasants say they are the drops that Undine wept after she had returned heartbroken to her water world. And so they call these pearls the tears of Undine. Will you have them, Undine?”

He bent toward her tenderly, and she held out her hand with a constrained gesture. “This Undine doesn’t intend to shed any tears of her own,” she answered, “and so, I suppose, that these drops will save her a lot of trouble. Thanks! Yes, do clasp it on. Thank you very much.” She tried to pull her hand away, but Stephen retained it in his own.

“I love you. Don’t you care a bit for me, Elfie?” he blurted, desperately. “Elfie, will you be my wife?”

She snatched her hand away this time, and scrambled to her feet. “Oh,” she cried, “don’t be silly, don’t be sentimental—here by the lovely, sensible sea, too!” Stephen rose and stood staring at her, and she went on with a hurried laugh: “Thank you very much, Mr. Glyn, and now that I have had a proposal, I shall always be a bachelor-lady, and shan’t ever have to worry about being an old maid. And the pearls are lovely, but I never intend to marry anyone—and now, oh, do let’s go into that dear black water.”

She stood, a lovely, pale figure in the moonlight, embarrassed, half-laughing, while her green eyes shot out and streamed a reckless gleam at the young man standing dejected before her. “Do you dare me?” she cried.

Stephen saw that in her present daredevil mood she was equal to anything. “No, please don’t!” he cried. “This time of night, in all those long draperies, it wouldn’t be safe—please don’t!”

“Not safe for Undine?” she laughed, defiantly. “Pooh, who’s afraid?” Stephen put out his hand to restrain her, but she laughed again—one of her long, silent chuckles. “Such a grand chance to show off. I’m not going to miss it!” she cried, and, eluding Stephen’s touch, she sprang like a long, silvery streak over the edge of the breakwater into the phosphorescent blackness beneath. In wrath and anxiety, the young man waited until her head emerged in a whirlpool of silvery fire.

“You are quite safe, Elfie?” he called, anxiously.

Her wild, careless laughter answered him. “Come in, the water’s fine. Come in; oh, come in! I dare you! I dare you!”

She swam off toward the moonlight with powerful side strokes, hardly diminished by her encumbering drapery. “I dare you!” she cried again.

No flesh and blood, not even of the most prudent young lawyer in New York, could withstand such a challenge. Heedless of consequences, Stephen flung himself over into the dark. The water was cold, his clothes were heavy; but he struck out valiantly. “Come on, oh, come on!” called the voice, far away on the surface of the water, and he strained every tendon to follow. A canoe drifted out slowly from somewhere—he didn’t know where—then it seemed to draw nearer, or else to disappear—he didn’t know which. The water was icy cold, his breath drew thick, his limbs, unaccustomed either to the cold or to the unwonted strain, were wrenched with a sudden muscular agony, and seemed to pass from his ownership and his control. Still, in the white moonlight before him, the black streak that he was following moved steadily along. He cursed himself as an effeminate monkey—“beaten by a girl!”

Then girls and Undines, farming implements and crystal palaces, whirled and shimmered dimly before his eyes. All he wanted was to rest—just a chance to rest! And, throwing out both arms, he gave himself up helplessly to the water.

II.

It was late the next morning when Martin thrust his cheerful little face in at the door of Stephen Glyn’s room at the hotel.

“Well, how are you to-day?” cried the newcomer. “Gee, that was a narrow squeak you had last night, and no mistake!”

Stephen woke with a start, and turned in a dim and growing amazement at the stiffness of his limbs, the painful heaviness of his breath. Slowly, as the little Yale man sat chattering by his bed, the troubled events of the night before came back to him—the foolhardy plunge from the breakwater, the interval of blank nothingness, the agonized struggle back into life, the hands working at his chest and his limbs; then the slow opening of his eyelids under the frightened face of young Martin, bending over him.

“Yes, I did make an ass of myself, and no mistake,” he mused, aloud, in a hoarse and broken voice.

“Nonsense!” cried Martin. “A cramp—why, that’s likely to come over anybody. No one could laugh at you for having a cramp; though Miss May——” he stopped short, with a half-embarrassed laugh.

“What about Miss May?” asked Stephen, trying to conceal the agitation he felt.

“Why, nothing. Only, I met her just now going out to sail with some of the fellows. They all stopped to ask how you were. She didn’t say a word—stood there looking queer, somehow. So I told them you were feeling better this morning with all the water pumped out of you; and she began to laugh; didn’t say a word, just stood and laughed, till, upon my word, I thought she was going to cry. She’s a funny one and no mistake—half fish, I call her.”

Glyn was silent. So this was the way that his narrow escape from drowning appeared to Elfrida—to her for whom he had risked not only his life, but his dignity as well.

“Can I do anything for you, old chap?” asked the other, with good-natured solicitude.

“Thanks, I think you have done quite enough for me already.”

“Pshaw!” cried Martin, rising in the alarm of approaching thanks. “It was nothing. And now I’ve got to be going downstairs. As for you, my boy, you’d better lie still to-day. You don’t want to get pneumonia out of this, do you?”

But in spite of timely warnings, in spite of aching limbs and a dizzy head, it was not very long after this that Stephen rose, dressed himself and went slowly downstairs. From the few people sitting about on the piazza waiting for lunch—ladies with toy poodles, old gentlemen with newspapers—Glyn received congratulations on his escape, and remarks of a more or less trying facetiousness. Of course Elfrida was not there; of course she had not yet returned from her sail. And even if she had, what difference should it make to him?

So he strolled down on the rocks toward the breakwater with a rather slow and uncertain step. His heart was sore within him. The future was dim; in the present, one fact only stood out with dreary distinctness—he had given the best love of his life where return was not only denied, but, from the nature of things, impossible. As well toss a rose in a monkey cage as bestow a living heart on a perverse and freakish child like Elfrida, who regarded the gift merely as the means of a moment’s amusement, to be picked to pieces and then tossed to the ground. After all, was she a woman, or, as Martin had said, a wild creature, half human and half fish, for the possession of whom it was useless to contend with her cold and tempestuous lover, the sea?

He caught himself almost shaking his fist in a helpless rage of jealousy at the little green waves that lapped at his feet. “Rubbish!” he said to himself, in scorn at the fanciful absurdity of his notion. But then, as the scene of last night came back to him, he shook his head in mournful bewilderment.

A light clatter of stones on the breakwater above his head roused him from his reverie. Looking up, he saw a white figure hurrying silently along. “Good-morning,” he called, with a wild hope that his thoughts had translated themselves into the wild, living embodiment. There was no answer. “Miss May, is that you?” he called again.

There was a moment’s pause, then Elfrida’s face, white and severe, appeared over the stone coping. “I didn’t intend that you should hear me pass,” she said, frowning. “It was these hateful old stones that gave me away.”

Glyn’s heart contracted. Was his presence so disagreeable to her, then, that she chid the very stones that betrayed her presence to him? Then concern for his own pain was lost in sudden concern for the unsteadiness of her position.

“Take care, please! Those stones are loose where you are standing, I can see from below here.”

She smiled willfully. “Thank you, Mr. Glyn, I am quite secure. You see, this breakwater is a friend of mine. It would never go back on me.”

In her words, as in her smile, Glyn found an echo of that laughter with which earlier in the day she had greeted Martin’s story of his narrow encounter with death. “Yes,” he replied, with a bitter sinking of the heart, “I did make rather an ass of myself last night, didn’t I?”

She laughed abruptly, but made no reply. Glyn stood looking up at her as she stood on the barrier of loose stones above his head—shading her eyes with the book that she held in her hand, looking out over the sea. A sense of his own helplessness rocked Glyn’s soul in a sudden rage. He wanted her, oh, he wanted her, as she stood there, cold and immovable, defended at every point by her own scornful ignorance of common human emotion, unassailed even by the twin lords of mankind, Love and Death, which had so newly brushed closely past her.

Suddenly she started and turned to meet his gaze with half-startled, inscrutable eyes. “The tide is on the turn,” she said, in a quick-breathed undertone—then the stone under her foot slipped and settled, she flung out her arms to steady herself, and barely recovered her balance as she swayed for an instant on the edge of the rough stone parapet. In wild anxiety Glyn sprang forward, heedless of her book, which fell fluttering past his head.

“Take care!” he cried. “Take care!”

She smiled down at him, her lips a little white, but otherwise perfectly composed. “It’s too bad,” she said. “From the first day I met you, I am always frightening you to death, Mr. Glyn.”

Was she thinking of his failure of the night before? Glyn’s heart quivered with mortification. “Yes,” he said; “it’s easy to frighten me, you see.”

She laughed again—a little, quick, troubled laugh. “But I didn’t come down here to see you, you know, Mr. Glyn,” she said. “I was going out on the end of the breakwater to read for a little while, till lunch time—I didn’t expect to see you, you know.”

Why need she disclaim so eagerly any wish to see him? thought Glyn to himself. Not much danger of his flattering himself to the contrary. So he bowed with as much composure as he could muster.

“Certainly,” he replied; “and I am very sorry to have intruded upon your solitude. But let me see, your book—it fell past me just now, I think.”

He turned to search among the bowlders which lay strewed about him. Suddenly Elfrida’s voice came to him, strained and high.

“Mr. Glyn,” she said, “please don’t take any trouble about my book.”

He paused, perplexed. “It’s no trouble, Miss May, I assure you. Look! I can see it there between the bowlders in the seaweed—a new book, isn’t it? Here, let me give it to you.”

He took a step toward it. “Mr. Glyn!” cried Elfrida. “You mustn’t—you mustn’t! I forbid you to touch my book!”

Glyn turned and gazed up at her. She was leaning down toward him from the rough masonry above, her hands stretched out, her face flushed to a bright crimson, her eyes sparkling, wide open, filled with anger and with something else besides—misgiving and something that was almost like fear.

“Mr. Glyn!” she repeated, violently. “Please go away now, please! And let me come down and pick up my book myself!”

Glyn looked up at her, at her face, wild, beautiful and threatening, bent down toward him. So her scorn for him was so deep, her detestation so entire, that he was not to be permitted to touch so much as the book that had fallen from her hand.

Now, at last, beyond a doubt, he had his answer. He stood silent for a moment, looking dumbly first at the half-soaked volume almost hidden among the seaweed, then at the head above him, so lovely and so carelessly terrible, bright and golden against the blue background of the sky.

“Miss May,” he said, “believe me, I had no intention of intruding on you. I beg your pardon, and—good-by, Elfie!”

Now, the solitary steamer that calls at Pemaquid makes her single trip in the morning; the overland route to the distant railway station is so hilly and rough as to be almost impossible to the few aged horses in the village; hence there are difficulties in the way of anybody who is resolved to take his departure from Pemaquid immediately after lunch. “It’s too bad,” drawled old Ben, in sympathetic reply to Stephen’s eager inquiries, “but, you see, down East here nobody ain’t ever in a hurry. We hev all the time they is. In the West, of course, I know it’s different. I suppose, naow, in N’ York you have a train every hour in the day, don’t you?”

Stephen stood helpless. To remain another day in Pemaquid, after what had happened, was to him an impossibility; and yet how to escape? His eye fell on a small fishing schooner at the end of the wharf, the only boat of seagoing size that the place boasted. Her sails were hoisted and two men were working at her anchor. A sudden idea came to Stephen. “Couldn’t I hire that boat,” he said, “to sail me over to Boothbay Harbor?”

Old Ben began to laugh. “Couldn’t you hire a whale?” he said. “That boat, she’s the Twin Sisters, and she belongs to my brother-in-law, Jabez Hooper, and he’s sot in his ways, like the old monument over there. This is the day he’s goin’ swordfishin’ in her; and now he’s p’inted her nose for ’Tit Menan, it would take more money than you could find in six pots o’ gold to git him to p’int her to the west’ard for you instead.”

Stephen grasped eagerly at the idea. A few more weeks away from his work—what did it matter now, after all, in the emptiness of the dog days? “Swordfishing? Just the thing! Do you think he’d take me with him?”

“As a passenger?” asked the cautious Ben.

“A passenger? Certainly. I’ll pay him anything in reason.”

To this proposition the old longshoreman gave a grudging and indifferent assent; then gleefully pushed out in a dory to arrange terms with his relative and wrangle about the amount of commission which his own enterprise was to receive; while Stephen went back to the hotel to pack up a few necessaries for the trip and arrange with the landlady for the storage of his luggage till his return.

A hurried inquiry brought forth the information that Martin had gone out sailing, together with most of the others. “Miss May, she’s gone, too,” remarked the woman, with the faint and flickering ghost of a smile. “They’ll all be real sorry to find you turn up missin’ when they come back, I’m sure of that.”

Glyn left a hastily scribbled note for Martin, and hurried down to the pier, with strength restored to his limbs and hope to his heart by this unlooked for and novel means of escape. On the deck of this rough fishing boat he might escape from the fancied chains which had weighed him down to the unmanly servitude here in Pemaquid. Here on the sea he might find “the world of men for a man”; the world of hand-to-hand struggle with forces unchanged since the earth was made; the wind, the water, the sharp necessities of the chase. Here, if anywhere, was the path of deliverance from the chimera of Unfulfilled Desire.

III.

It was nearly three weeks later that the Twin Sisters rounded Allen’s Island—traveling, as her skipper said, “with a bone in her mouth”—and set her homeward course across the windy and sparkling waters of Muscongus Bay. In the stern the steersman flung his weight on the wheel; in the bow lay Stephen, his hand closed upon the helplessly fluttering leaves of his “Dairy Machinery,” his eyes fixed upon the mound of glittering green foam that swept in perpetual advance of the vessel’s bow.

Through his mind flitted a shifting retrospect of these last weeks upon the sea—the rushing voyage through rock-sown bays and windy fairways; the days of creaking rise-and-fall upon the heavy swell of a dead and scorching sea, or of groping for buoys through the blind white fog; nights under the starlight, nights when the wild summer rain had driven him for shelter to the hot and evil-smelling cabin of the little schooner. And, above all, the ceaseless watch for the great fish that they had come to hunt, the tense excitement of the signal, the swift dark flight of the harpoon; then the breathless chase of the flying keg that marked the flight of the frenzied monster across the sea. In their wild hunts Stephen had shown a reckless audacity, a rapidly acquired skill, that gradually commanded the respect of the cynical and indifferent Captain Jabez himself. “Y’ain’t so bad, for a rusticator,” was his outspoken praise. Stephen sighed in helpless irritation; after all, what was the use of pretending to himself that it was the respect of his fellow man for which he exerted himself in these strenuous exertions to show nautical strength and skill? What was the use, after all, of leaving Pemaquid at all, so long as the very sea foam itself brought him a fantastic vision of white arms flashing from the water, and each curling green wave recalled to him a pair of eyes deeper and more transparent than the sea itself?

“Spoony!” hissed Stephen, in fierce self-contempt, when suddenly the skipper raised a languid cry from the stern.

“There’s the old p’int, Stephen, if you want to see it.”

Sure enough, there were the high brown walls of Pemaquid, bare to the wind and the surrounding ocean. In spite of himself, Stephen’s heart leaped up as he regarded it.

The wind calmed down with the approaching sunset as the Twin Sisters floated slowly in between the breakwaters, recalling to Stephen that first evening when his boat had been met and boarded by a wandering sea nymph. This time the mirrored sunset was empty and bare, the harbor was silent.

“Reckon they’re all busy with their fried lobster an’ hot biscuit, up to the hotel,” remarked Captain Jabez, sourly, as he surveyed their catch, laid out upon the deck—seven great swordfishes, black and shapeless, like elongated kitchen stoves, their skin still glistening from their icy bed in the vessel’s hold. “I thought we’d git a dozen,” he remarked, discontentedly. “Mind, I tell you, it’s just my luck. A catch like that makes me feel like all my folks was sick to home.”

Suddenly from the end of the breakwater a white figure started up, her eyes shielded with a book, her hair reddened brilliantly by the sinking sun.

“For the law’s sakes!” exclaimed Captain Jabez. “See, there’s what’s-her-name, the fish girl, waitin’ to see us land!”

Stephen turned; the world was warm and smiling. Was she really waiting for him? He waved his hat and cried to her. For a moment she stood, white, slim and motionless; then, with a single gesture, lifeless and perfunctory, she turned and walked slowly up to the hotel.

“Of course,” said Stephen to himself, in vain mockery at his own pain. After all, what did it matter? Tomorrow he would leave it forever, this cold and alluring coast of Maine; and with paved streets and the rush of work would come forgetfulness.

Martin welcomed him warmly at the hotel. “Gee, you’re as brown as a nut,” he said, “and old Jabez says you’re the best hand he ever had—worth any two of these native loafers about here. Say, come and sit at my table, and tell us about your trip.”

So, after Glyn had changed to the garb of civilization, he came down and ate his supper, listening to the merry chatter of the little Yale man. Elfrida bowed to him as he entered, but left the table soon after he sat down. “I am going down to the breakwater, to look at those poor swordfish that you killed,” she said, with some reproach, as she passed by him. Her face was severe and unsmiling; it seemed to Glyn that she was paler than usual, and her large eyes were faintly shadowed with dark circles beneath their lids.

“What’s the matter with Miss May?” he asked Martin, abruptly.

The other turned his eyes from her retreating figure. “Oh, yes, I forgot you’d been away. We’ve had great excitements since you were gone, here at little Pemaquid.”

“What was the matter?” cried Stephen, while a thousand terrible possibilities rose in his mind.

Martin began to laugh. “Oh, nothing very thrilling, that I could see. But that girl—you know she’s a queen, but she’s half a freak, too—the good half! Anyone that tries to understand her will have his job cut out for life.”

Glyn raised his cup of tea carelessly. “But what did you say it was that happened?”

“Why, this is the way it was—see if it doesn’t make you tired! Everybody was talking about it. You remember that time last month when you came so near your end, going in with her the night of the dance, she never made a sound. And last week, when she lost a little trifling bracelet in swimming—gee! she burst out crying right there on the pier before everybody!”

A wild thought flitted into Stephen’s mind. “What kind of a bracelet was it?” he inquired, with elaborate indifference.

“Nothing very much, to make a girl cry like that—a girl like Elfie, too, the cold, superior, athletic kind. But, then, she’d been acting queer for some time, didn’t you notice? No, it was since you went away—nervous and quiet, and ready to snap your head off if you spoke to her, always sitting down there on the breakwater, reading—Elfie reading! Just fancy that! Gee! I never saw a girl change so quick before.”

Stephen went on with his supper. “Well, did she find her bracelet?” he inquired, carelessly.

“After the harbor was turned inside out—that’s the excitement, you see. The whole town was out every day. Then she offered a reward—fifty dollars; then a hundred. She wanted to send to Portland for divers. But an old native chap found it at low tide—old Ben, you know, that is always fishing there on the dock. So she paid him, on the nail—a hundred plunks. And her mother said she couldn’t have any autumn clothes, and she said she didn’t care one scrap.” Stephen lit a cigarette with elaborate pains. “So, I suppose,” he observed, tentatively, “that it was quite an elaborate bit of jewelry.”

“That’s the joke. A hundred dollars would have bought a dozen like it—just clam pearls and silver. Say, it’s a peachy evening. Let’s go and look up some of the crowd, and have a marshmallow toast on the beach.”

Glyn rose. “I’m sorry, Martin, I have to go down and help my skipper ashore with our catch. See you later—business, you see.”

“Three cheers for the bold fisherman!” grinned Martin, as Stephen rushed from the hall with an eagerness which did credit to his sense of duty toward Jabez.

Twilight was drawing down, damp and dusky, over rocks and harbor, as Stephen hurried down to the breakwater. With swift precaution, he stepped along over the loose stones—no one was there. He looked about in desperate search. Then, in a little rocky nook at the extreme point, he caught the glint of a familiar yellow head.

“Elfie!” he called, softly, as he hastened toward her. Her white form rose up; she stood there looking at him, her book still in her hand—looking at him silently.

As he joined her she laughed, a little, nervous laugh. “Oh, Mr. Glyn, is that you?” she said. “And have you come to tell me about your cruise?”

For a moment Stephen stood at a loss. Here before those clear cool eyes, what Martin had told him seemed so absurd, so impossible. His eyes fell upon the book in her hand. Suddenly, as he read the title in the fading light, his heart beat again high and quick.

He put out his hand and gently took the volume from her. “I see that you have been reading about Undine,” he said, tentatively.

She flushed a bright rose color; it was the second time he had ever seen her color change. “Ah!” she cried, in a pale reflection of her old mocking defiance. “The story you told me about—I’m sorry, you know, but, really, I don’t find it very interesting.”

Stephen looked at her. “Elfie——” he said, but she stretched out her hand in sudden embarrassment. “Give it back to me, please,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to be reading it now. Give it to me, please.”

For a moment Stephen stared at her, bewildered at this sudden intensity of appeal. With her old impulsiveness, she flung out her arm to snatch the betraying volume from his grasp. The laces of her sleeve fell back, and there about her wrist Stephen beheld a bracelet—a string of large, irregular pearls, rimmed and linked in silver.

He dropped the book and seized the hand in both of his own.

“So you still think of me sometimes, Elfie?”

She glanced up at him, frowning.

“Why did you go away without saying good-by to me last month?” she asked, with her old air of severity.

“I didn’t want to bother you. I knew you didn’t care.” Beneath the rigid inquisition of her gaze, Stephen stumbled over his words.

“You thought I didn’t care!” She turned her eyes away from him, and twisted the bracelet upon her wrist. “Do you care?” she asked, abruptly.

“Elfrida, you know why I had to come back. You know that I care about nothing else in the world but just you—dear, dearest little Elfie!”

She stepped back. “And yet,” she said, with a catch in her voice, “you went away and left me.”

“But, Elfie dear, what else could I do? After you had laughed at me, after you had refused to let me touch as much as your book when you dropped it here on the beach!”

She began to laugh brokenly. “Don’t you understand?” she said, softly. “I wasn’t going to let you know how silly I was. I couldn’t let you see that I had sent for the book for myself—just because I wanted to read again the story that you had told to me.”

“Elfie! My own dear Elfie!”

She raised her hand. “No, Stephen, one moment! Listen to me.” She leaned toward him a little, standing there white and slender in the gathering dusk, while Stephen listened eagerly. The little waves lapped and gurgled through the rocky spaces of the breakwater; all about them was the quiet evening of the sea.

“Last month, when you told me about Undine, I hated you,” she said, passionately; “because I thought you meant that she was me, all the time. And I was bound to show you that I wasn’t weak and silly like that, and that I didn’t care a single scrap! And I didn’t care then, either—not till that night when I was such a beast to you, and made such a fool of myself, and you almost died—all my fault! So next day I was so ashamed of myself, I didn’t dare even to speak to you, until I had told you I was sorry. And just then I was so afraid you’d see that book, that I made you go away—little fool! As though that made any difference!” She paused a moment. “And then in the evening I came back and found that you were really gone away, without a single word!”

She raised her eyes to him slowly, and, to his amazement, he saw that they were bright with the transparent wetness of tears.

“Do you remember,” she whispered, brokenly, “how—that night—I told you that I never intended to shed any tears—planning to live like a little brute? And you gave me these pearls, and told me they were the tears that Undine had wept, after her soul had been given to her. Oh, Stephen! There’s not a night since that night that I haven’t cried myself to sleep thinking of you. So now I know that I have a soul, and I have a heart. And the heart is all yours, if you want it, Stephen!”