He did not speak. He emerged swiftly from among them, and they all watched him in silence while he stooped to the dim river and slipped in. He turned his face, his hidden face, downstream, and went floating and swimming gently along. He too was happy.
A dark misty solitude of night and water was ahead of him, and he went into it without pause or backward look, and it folded around him. Horror crept in: for he was disappearing.
A voice broke ringingly, in anguish:
‘Come back!’
It shattered itself, aghast, upon emptiness.
Softly he vanished.
She cried aloud and woke into a night streaming, blind with the rain’s enormous weeping.
He never came again.
His son was born and his grandmother died; but he was too far, too spent a ghost to raise his head at that.