CHAPTER VI.

THE SEA-MAID.

Caius understood that he had still three miles of the level beach to
tread. At first he hardly felt the sand under his feet, they were so
dead with cold. The spray from the roaring tide struck his face
sideways. He had time now to watch each variation, each in and out of
the dune, and he looked at them eagerly, as the only change that was
afforded to the monotony. Then for the first time he learned how
completely a man is shut out from all one half of the world by the
simple command not to look behind him, and all the unseen half of his
world became rife, in his thought, with mysterious creatures and their
works. At first he felt that he was courting certain death by keeping
the word he had given; in the clap of the waves he seemed to hear the
pistol-shot that was to be his doom, or the knife-like breath of the
wind seemed the dagger in the hand of a following murderer. But as he
went on and no evil fate befell, his fear died, and only curiosity
remained--a curiosity so lively that it fixed eagerly upon the stretch
of the surf behind him, upon his own footsteps left on the soft sand,
upon the sand-hills that he had passed, although they were almost the
same as the sand-hills that were before. It would have been a positive
joy to him to turn and look at any of these things. While his mind
dwelt upon it, he almost grudged each advancing step, because it put
more of the interesting world into the region from which he was shut out
as wholly as if a wall of separation sprang up between the behind and
before.

By an effort of will he turned his thought from this desire, or from
considering what the mysterious something could be that it was
all-important for him not to see, or who it was that in this desolate
place would spy upon him if he broke his vow.

When his activity had set the blood again coursing warmly in his veins,
all that was paltry and depressing passed from his mind and heart, as a
mist is rolled away by the wind. The sweet, wild air, that in those
regions is an elixir of life to the stranger, making him young if he be
old, and if he be young making him feel as demigods felt in days of
yore, for a day and a night had been doing its work upon him. Mere life
and motion became to him a delight such as he had never felt before; and
when the moon came out again from the other side of the cloud, the sight
of her beams upon surf and sand was like a rare wild joy. He was glad