Far down in the clear water I could see the giant sea-fans waving in a moony twilight, touched eerily in those glassy depths with sudden rays of the spectral light; soft bowers of phosphorescence spread a secret radiance about dimly branching coral groves.  And, all the while, the path of the moon over the sea was growing stronger—­laying, it would seem, an even firmer pathway of silver stretching to the very foot of the cliff-side.

I am not given to quoting poetry, but involuntarily there came to my mind some lines remembered from boyhood: 

    If on some balmy summer night
    You rowed across the moon-path white,
    And saw the shining sea grow fair
    With silver scales and golden hair—­
        What would you do?

“What would you do?” I repeated dreamily, thinking very likely as I said them, of two eyes of mysteriously enfolding fire; and then, as if the fairy night were matching the words with a challenge, what was this bright wonder suddenly present on one of the boulders far down beneath me?—­a tall shape of witchcraft whiteness, standing, full in the moon, like a statue in luminous marble of some goddess of antiquity.  Only once before, and but for a moment, had I seen a woman’s form so proudly flowerlike in its superb erectness!

My eyes and my heart together told me it was she; and, as she hung poised over the edge of the water, in the attitude of one about to dive, a turn of her head gave me that longed-for glimpse of those living eyes filled with moonlight.  She stood another moment, still as the night, in her loveliness; and the next, she had dived directly into the path of the moon.  I saw her eyes moon-filled again, as she came to the surface, and began to swim—­not, as one might have expected, out from the land, but directly in toward the unseen base of the cliffs.  The moon-path did lead to a golden door in the rocks, I said to myself, and she was about to enter it.  It was a secret door known only to herself; and then, for the first time that night, I thought of that doubloon.

Perhaps if I had not thought of it, I should not have done what then I did.  There will, doubtless, be those who will censure me.  If so, I am afraid they must.  At all events, it was the thought of that doubloon that swayed the balance of my hesitation in taking the moon-path in the track of that bright apparition.  The pursuit of my hidden treasure had long been so fixed an idea in my mind that a scruple would have had to be strong indeed to withstand my impulse to follow up so exciting a clue. (When, alas! has the pursuit of gold heeded any scruples?) Or it is quite possible that a radically different inclination held this materialistic excuse as a cloak for itself.  A moment of such glamorous excitement may well account for some confused psychology.

I leave it to others who, less fortunate than I, were not exposed to the breathless enchantments of that immortal night, those sorceries of a situation lovely as the wildest dreams of the heart.  I looked about for a way down to the edge of the sea.  It was not easy to find, but after much perilous scrambling, I at length found myself on the boulder which had so lately been the pedestal of that Radiance; and, in another moment, I had dived into the moon-path and was swimming toward the mysterious golden door.