would have been an event known to all the fishermen if another party
had made a journey along the sands. When the snow came the sands were
impassable. As soon as the ice on the bay would bear, there would be
coming and going, no doubt; but until then Caius had the restful
security that she was near him, and that it could not be many days
before he saw her. The only flaw in his conclusion was that the fact did
not bear it out; he did not see her.

At length it became clear that the maiden was hiding herself. Caius
ceased to hope that he would meet her by chance, because he knew he
would already have done so if it were not willed otherwise. Then his
mind grew restless again, and impatient; he could not even imagine where
she could lie hidden, or what possible reason there could be for a life
of uncomfortable concealment.

Caius had not allowed either O'Shea or Madame Le Maitre to suspect that
in his stumble he had involuntarily seen his companion on the midnight
journey. He did not think that the sea-maid herself knew that he had
seen her there. He might have been tempted now to believe that the
vision was some bright illusion, if its reality had not been proved by
the fact that Madame Le Maitre knew that he had a companion, and that
O'Shea had staked much that he should not take that long moonlight walk
by her side.

Since the day on which he had become sure that the sea-maid had such
close and real connection with human beings that he met every day, he
had ceased to have those strange and uncomfortable ideas about her,
which, in half his moods, relegated her into the region of freaks
practised upon mortals by the denizens of the unseen, or, still farther,
into the region of dreams that have no reality. However, now that she
had retired again into hiding, this assurance of his was small comfort.

He would have resolutely inquired of Madame Le Maitre who it was who had
been sent to warn him of danger if need be upon the beach, but that the
lady was not one to allow herself willingly to be questioned, and in
exciting her displeasure he might lose the only chance of gaining what
he sought. Then, too, with the thought of accosting the lady upon this
subject there always arose in his mind the remembrance of the brief
minute in which, to his own confounding, he had seen the face of the
sea-maid in the lady's own face, and a phantom doubt came to him as to
whether she were not herself the sea-maid, disfigured and made aged