"She has come back to me!" The poor mother spoke in tones of exquisite happiness. "She is grown a big girl; she has curls on her head, and she wears a marriage-ring. Who is she married to?"
Caius could not answer.
The mother looked at him with curious steadfastness.
"I thought perhaps she was married to you," she said.
Surely the woman had seen what he had seen in the sea; but, question her as he would, Caius could gain nothing more from her—no hint of time or place, or any fact that at all added to his enlightenment. She only grew frightened at his questions, and begged him in moving terms not to tell Day that she had spoken to him—not to tell the people in the village that her daughter had come back, or they would put her again in the asylum. Truly, this last appeared to Cains a not unlikely consequence, but it was not his business to bring it about. It was not for him, who shared her delusion, to condemn her.
After that, Caius knew that either he was mad or what he had 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.