CHAPTER IV.
THE CRAB.
Oscar could never see enough of his little water-maiden; and he talked to her perhaps all the more because she answered him only by sympathetic thoughts. He told her all that he knew of his life before she came to him—about his dreams by night and his reveries by day; about all the beauties of the world that she could not see from the crystal imprisonment of her vase; about his mother, too, and how the sails of the ship in which she went away had been lit up by the light beyond just before reaching the horizon verge. He spoke likewise of his father, how good and great he was, and how, although he lived and ruled in a distant country, he never forgot to send his little son all things that were necessary for his comfort and happiness.
'And I believe, Theeda,' added Oscar, 'that he put you in the pearl-shell for me. Perhaps you have seen him?'
Theeda threw back her floating mist of hair, and smiled.
'Ah, of course, everybody who is good and lovely must have come from him,' Oscar murmured, as if answering something she had said. And then he went on to talk about the book, and of the strange picture he had seen in it the day before she appeared.
'I think, now,' he said, 'that the wanderer in the forest must have been myself; and the precious pearl that was given to him out of the fountain was you. But who was the blind and dumb man with the onion?'
At that Theeda's head dropped, and she sank slowly down on the sand, and she hid her face in her hands.