“‘They’ll go home soon,’ I said, and I turned my eyes steadfastly toward the sheeny track, all crimpled and curled with fibrous net-work, and rowed on.

“It was a glorious night,—­a night when one toss of a mermaid’s hair, made visible above the waters, as she flew along the track I was pursuing, would have been worth a life of rowing against this incoming tide.

“You have never tried to row, Miss Anna.  You don’t know how hard it is to push a boat out of a river when the sea sends up full veins to course the strong arms she reaches up into the land.”

For one moment, as he addressed me, his eyes lost their rapt look; they went back to it, and he to his story.

“I saw the fin of a shark dancing in the waves.  Sharks were nothing for me.  I did not look down into my boat.  No, men never do; they look beyond where they are.  They’re a sorry race, Miss Anna.

“The shark went down after some bit of prey more delicious than I. My will would have been hard for him to manage.  I forgot the shark.  I forgot the figures standing, waiting on the shore that I had left, ere Lettie and the shadow that walked with her, whatever it was, had come to it.  I forgot everything but the phosphorescent dew that would cool my spirit, athirst for what I knew not, ravenous for refreshment, searching for manna where it never grew.  The plaudits of yesterday were ringing in my ears, the wavelets danced to their music, my oars kept time to the vanity measure of my beating mind.  Still I was not content.  I wanted something more.  A faded flower, an althea-bud, was still pendent from my coat.  I had taken it out from the mass of flowers with which I had been honored.  I noticed it now.  The moon dewed it over with its yellowness.  ‘An offering to the sea-nymphs!’ I said, and I cast it forth into the wide field.  It did not go down, as I had fancied it would.  No, it went on, whither the movement of the ceaseless dance of motion carried it.  I leaned upon my oars and watched it until it went out of the illuminated track.  I was now in the bay, outside the river.  I looked once more shoreward.  I had threaded the curve of the stream, and could not see around the point.  No living human thing was in sight.  I was alone with Nature in the night, when she looks down glories, and spreads out fields where we long to walk, and our footsteps are fast in clay.  I was not far from shore; it lay dark behind me; it was only before that I could see.  As I paused in my rowing to watch the althea-bud set afloat, I heard a tiny splash in the waters.

“‘A school of fish flashing up a moment,’ I thought, and did not further heed it.”

The man looked as if he were now out at sea.  He turned his head the least bit:  the effect against the sky was fine.  He had an attitude of watching and listening.

“I saw an object before me moving on the waters.  I looked down.  The water was rising in my own boat.  I could not heed it just now.