And then, two hundred yards or so from me, the water broke with a floundering splash. I gasped, stared numbed. A floundering, oblong pink-white thing was there at the end of my line. A slim white arm flailed up as the thing turned, swimming on the surface frantically away from me. Pink-white limbs gleaming in the moonlight. Streaming tawny hair, like seaweed—hair in which my hook seemed to be caught.
A girl! I had her at the boat in a moment, floundering in the moonlight, gasping, still trying to twist around and disentangle my hook from her long streaming hair. A small, slim figure, white-limbed yet flushed like moonlit coral. There was a brief dangling robe wetly clinging to her. It was of gleaming lustrous green as though perhaps it was a fabric of softly woven metal, painted green by the sea.
An extraordinary yet very human girl.
Just a few seconds of my stricken amazement. I recall that I gasped inanely.
"Well—why good Heavens—"
Her gasping laugh rippled like the splashing water in the moonlight. "Sorry! I got some frightened to be confused."
English! Strangely intoned with little rippling liquid syllables. Like nothing I had ever heard before and yet my own language.
She had pulled my hook from the gleaming tawny tresses of her hair. Then she flung up a coral-white arm. I bent, seized her wrist, drew her up and she came with a nimble, skilled little leap and landed on her feet in the boat beside me!
II