d seen he had
seen, let the explanation be what it might--and he ceased to care much
about the explanation. He remembered the look of heart-satisfaction with
which Day's wife had told him that her child had returned. The beautiful
face looking from out the waves had no doubt wrought happiness in her;
and in him also it had wrought happiness, and that which was better. He
ceased to wrestle with the difference that the adventure had made in his
life, or to try to ignore it; he had learned to love someone far better
than himself, and that someone seemed so wholly at one with the nature
in which she ranged, and also with the best he could think concerning
nature, human or inanimate, that his love extended to all the world for
her sake.

CHAPTER X.

TOWED BY THE BEARD.

Every morning Caius still took his early way along the shore, but on all
these walks he found himself alone in possession of the strand and the
vast blue of sea and sky. It was disappointing, yet the place itself
exercised a greater and greater charm over him.

He abstained from fooling away his days by the sea. After his one
morning walk he refused himself the luxury of being there again, filling
his time with work. He felt that the lady of the lovely face would
despise him if he spent his time absurdly.

Thus some days passed; and then there came a night when he left a bed on
which he had tossed wakefully, and went in the hot August night to the
side of the sea when no one knew that he went or came.

The air was exceedingly warm. The harvest moon in the zenith was
flooding the world with unclouded light. The tide was ebbing, and
therefore there was in the channel that swift, dangerous current
sweeping out to sea of which he had once experienced the strength.
Caius, who associated his sea-visitant only with the sunlight and an
incoming tide, did not expect to see her now; frequent disappointment
had bred the absence of hope. He stood on the shore, looking at the
current in which he had so nearly perished as a boy. It was glittering
with white moon-rays. He thought of himself, of the check and twisting
which his motives and ideas had lately received, and as he thought how
slight a thing had done it, how mysterious and impossible a thing it
was, his mind became stunned, and he faced the breeze, and simply lived
in the sweetness of the hour, like an animal, conscious, not of itself,
but only of what is external, without past or future.

And now