Yet that the mermaid was the lost child he had now little doubt, except that he wholly doubted the evidence of his senses, and that there was a mermaid.
He nodded to her that he understood her meaning about the name, and she gave him a little wave of her hand as if to say good-bye, and began to recede slowly, gliding backward, only her head seen above the disturbed water.
"Don't go," called Caius, much urgency in his words.
But the slow receding motion continued, and no answer came but another gentle wave of the hand.
The hand of Caius stole involuntarily to his lips, and he wafted a kiss across the water.

Then suddenly it seemed to him that the cliff had eyes, and that it might be told of him at home and abroad that he was making love to a phantom, and had lost his wits.
The sea-child only tossed her head a little higher out of the water, and again he saw, or fancied he saw, mirth dancing in her eyes.
She beckoned to him and turned, moving away; then looked back and beckoned, and darted forward again; and, doing this again and again, she made straight for the open sea.
Caius cursed himself that he had not the courage to jump in and swim after her at any cost.

But then he could not swim so fast--certainly not in his clothes.

"There was something so wonderfully human about her face," he mused to himself.

His mind suggested, as was its wont, too many reasonable objections to the prompt, headlong course which alone would have availed anything.
While he stood in breathless uncertainty, the beckoning hand became lost in the blur of sparkling ripples; the head, lower now, looked in the water at a distance as like the muzzle of a seal or dog as like a human head.