"We saw a mermaid," answered Annet. "She was sitting on the rock outside the cove; and first she was singing to a kind of harp, and afterwards she sang as she combed her hair. And then someone fired a gun at her from the cliffs, and she disappeared, and we were frightened and ran away. We did not see who fired the gun, nor if she was wounded. It was not brave of us to run away so quickly, and we have been sorry ever since."
"What nonsense is this?" growled their father. "Annet, my child, we tell the truth—all of us—here on Saaron."
"It may have been a seal," hazarded the Commandant. "I am told that Piper's Hole used to be a famous spot for seals."
But Annet lifted her chin and answered, her eyes steadily raised to her father's face. "No, it was not a seal; it was a mermaid. She sang and combed her hair just as I told you. It was beginning to grow dark, but we could see her quite plainly." She turned for confirmation to Linnet and Matthew Henry, and they both nodded.
Their father growled again that this was nonsense; but the Commandant, lifting a hand, asked what had taken them to the cliffs above Piper's Hole. It could not (he suggested) have been that they expected to catch sight of a mermaid.
"Yes," answered Annet again; "that was just the reason." She was speaking frankly, as a child can speak; but children have their own code of honour, and it forbids them to give away a friend. "Jan was telling us, only the other day," she explained with careful lucidity, "how his father had once caught a mermaid in a pool there. We wanted very much to see one, and so we planned to go. But afterwards, when father rowed us home, we did not like to tell him about it. We were afraid he would laugh at us; and we were frightened, too; afraid that the mermaid had been hurt; and—and we were upset because father had brought the boat for us instead of Jan Nanjulian——"
"But most of all," put in Linnet, "I was upset because I had been saying that there were no such things."
"You silly children, of course there are no such things," said their mother.
But Matthew Henry, ignoring her, and more in pity than in anger, turned on the Commandant. "Are you come," he asked, "because she is hurt?"
"She? Who?"